This article was reprinted with permission from Superpower.com.
China and the United States recently fell into a trade dispute. China's electronic chips in many industries rely on U.S. companies for supply. Therefore, Chinese companies are easily stuck in this dispute. Semiconductor chips are also a key industry in China and manufactured in China. The 2025 plan occupies the core position.
Interestingly, in China’s statistical import and export, ICs imported from the United States are totally insignificant. The largest importer is South Korea, and the second largest importer is Malaysia, accounting for more than 20%.
This was the case. Not long ago, the National Information Center issued a report entitled “The Belt and Road Report on Trade Cooperation Big Data 2018”, which counts the trade situation between China and the countries along the Belt and Road, which involves the import catalog No. 8542 ( The part of the integrated circuit) is as follows:
In 2017, China imported 113.98 billion U.S. dollars of integrated circuit chips from the Belt and Road countries, of which imports from South Korea accounted for 57.6%, up 4.1% from 2016. ICs imported from Malaysia accounted for 20.9%, down 4.6 percentage points year-on-year. The third place is the Philippines, which accounts for 6%, and the share from Singapore is also 5.8%, 4.9% from Vietnam, and the top five countries account for 95%.
In other words, even if imported from the United States, the U.S. share is only in the other 5%.
Does this sound very strange? Some readers should guess what's going on, and the import and export statistics are from the direct source country.
South Korea’s 57.6% accounted for the good explanation. Since the company is Samsung alone, the SK Hynix companies account for more than 50% of global NAND and 70% of DRAM, while China is almost 100% dependent on imports in this area. The import of at least 65 billion U.S. dollars of integrated circuits, the vast majority are memory, flash particles.
How does Malaysia account for 21%? This is actually Malaysia's relationship with several semiconductor packaging plants. From the import value, China imports about 24 billion U.S. dollars worth of chips from Malaysia every year. Although the official does not specify, but a large part of it should be X86 processor.
Many AMD processors are also packaged in Malaysia
Some readers may know that Intel Corp. has a packaging plant in Malaysia. The inquiry website can be informed that Intel has a packaging plant in the city of Kulim, Malaysia. There is also a packaging plant in Penang, Malaysia. However, AMD sold its Suzhou, Malaysia, a few years ago. 85% of the shares of the two packaging plants in Penang.
Intel, AMD's Revenue Ratio from China Market
Intel's revenue for one year is about 60 billion U.S. dollars. AMD also has more than 4 billion U.S. dollars in revenue for the year. The two companies also have high dependence on the Chinese market. Statistics show that Intel has 40%, and AMD has 26 % of revenue comes from the Chinese market, and a large part of the chips are packaged in Malaysia, so more than 20 billion U.S. dollars worth of imports are well understood - of course, this is not only AMD, Intel processors, other U.S. companies are also involved.
In fact, this matter is also a reason for the trade dispute between China and the United States. The United States believes that China has obtained a surplus of more than US$370 billion from the United States, but US statistics are only counted by its own country’s exports, and a significant portion of these chips imported by China are all of the United States. The company packaged in factories outside the United States.
