In the past, wafer foundries gradually shifted their production capacity to 12 inches. The global production capacity of 6, 8 inches gradually decreased, and the outsourcing production of international IDM plants has become a trend. This year in the automotive power management ICs, fingerprint identification ICs and MOSFETs (both appearing double The growth in the number of digits has driven Taiwan's second-tier wafer foundry performance to take off.
One of the world's advanced companies received orders from foreign manufacturers for IDM production last year, especially for automotive electronics. This year in power management ICs, fingerprint identification ICs will see double-digit growth. The visibility of orders will reach the end of the second quarter. The demand for inches has increased significantly, and production capacity is not being demanded. The new capacity of the fourth wafer fab is being evaluated. It is estimated that the capital expenditure in 2018 will be 2.1 billion yuan, an increase of 300 million yuan over the previous year.
In the end of the solar cell business, MOS has switched to professional wafer foundry, and the operation saw improvement every year. This year, thanks to the good market conditions of MOSFETs and diodes, the capacity utilization rate has reached full capacity. In the second quarter, it strives to turn profit into profit. In response to the huge market demand, Mao In the third quarter of this year, Silicon plans to increase its original monthly capacity of 57,000 6-inch wafers to 60,000 wafers per month. It is expected that the pace of profit taking in the second half of the year will increase.
In addition, Siemens has adjusted its product structure to reduce the proportion of low-voltage MOSFETs and low-current diode products whose gross margin performance is less than ideal, and turned to high-voltage, high-current (60A-200A) products required by automobile gauges and industry. , and accelerate the pace of IGBT layout, is expected to complete the development in March, tightly transferred to sample customers, the smooth operation in the third quarter of this year have the opportunity to produce a small amount.