At present, the first echelon of global storage vendors is occupied by Samsung, Hynix, Powerchip, Toshiba and Micron Technology. The Chinese manufacturers are completely invisible, and several giant companies occupy almost the entire market share of the storage industry. China is the world's largest server, PC and smartphone market. The demand for memory chips is extremely large. In 2014, China's procurement of memory chips accounted for 20% of the global total. In 2015, it increased to 30%. In recent years, the proportion has increased further. Two of the world's top 10 storage chip purchasers are from China, Lenovo and Huawei.
In the past two years, the soaring memory prices have made many Chinese companies miserable. The urgency of developing and producing memory products belonging to China has greatly increased. The storage chip industry has an extremely important significance for China, that is, information. Security. In the market, national information security and other considerations, storage chips have become China's key development projects. Although there are still many gaps in the domestic development level and giant companies in technology, Chinese companies are struggling to catch up. The largest investment is Ziguang Group and its storage technology chip base located in the state of Wuhan, Yangtze River Storage Technology. In the field of memory chips, Ziguang is one of the three camps in China's semiconductor storage field, can be said to be the national team representatives. Below, Let's take a look at the specific situation of this company with the eight sisters.
Multiple mergers and acquisitions, achieving breakthroughs in zero deposits
Ziguang Group is a high-tech enterprise under Tsinghua University. It is also the largest integrated IC company in China and the third largest mobile phone chip company in the world. This book-filled university company has been unrestrained in the past few years under the leadership of President Zhao Weiguo. The capital operation, in just a few years, has created the embryonic form of the Purple Empire.
In the eyes of the outside world, Ziguang Group is a mysterious company. Since 2013, the company has been continuously acquiring chips, leading companies in the storage industry. The feeling for most people is: The Violet Group seems to be very big in the next set. Chess. Obviously, the well-known enterprises in the M&A industry are for the purpose of establishing the industrial bridgehead and beachhead positions for the Ziguang Group, so as to quickly enter the market and become an important player in this field, shortening the development time.
Let's first review the key sweeping list of the Ziguang Group in the semiconductor industry in recent years.
In December 2013, with the international cooperation as the means, the acquisition of the NASDAQ listed in the United States was ranked first in the world, and the world's third-ranked communication baseband chip design company Spreadtrum, which is a smartphone. One of the core chip suppliers, its 4G chip platform was adopted by Samsung mobile phones.
In July 2014, Ziguang completed the acquisition of RDA, the second-largest communication chip design company in China, which is a Nasdaq-listed company. RADICO has a chip design for mobile phone communication. Its unique advantages.
In May 2015, Ziguang reached an agreement with Hewlett-Packard (HP) China to acquire a 51% stake in HP's wholly-owned subsidiary H3C and HP China, and renamed the company name Xinhua San.
In July 2015, Ziguang International, a subsidiary of Ziguang Group, invested 100 million US dollars to acquire Hong Kong Acadine Technologies, a software development company that can only operate mobile phone operating systems (OS).
In October 2015, Ziguang announced the signing of a strategic alliance contract and subscription agreement with Taiwan Licheng Technology. Ziguang Group invested approximately US$600 million in Licheng Technology and acquired approximately 25% of Licheng’s shares, becoming its largest shareholder. Licheng Technology Known as the test of the third brother, in the world of packaging and testing industry has a pivotal position.
In July 2015, Ziguang acquired Micron Technologies for US$23 billion. Micron is the world's leading supplier of memory chips, but this acquisition was not realized due to the intervention of the US government.
In October 2015, Ziguang Group invested US$3.8 billion through its wholly-owned subsidiary in Hong Kong, Ziguang United Information Co., Ltd., to subscribe for a new 15% stake in Western Digital at a price of US$92.5 per share. The US Overseas Investment Committee intervened, and Ziguang finally gave up its investment. Later, in 2016, it announced a joint venture with Western Digital, Ziguang Western Digital Co., Ltd., which is committed to providing big data storage solutions and services.
In December 2015, Ziguang announced that it has reached an agreement with Sony Chip, a computer memory chip design company, to acquire Huaxin for 72.9 billion yen.
In April 2016, Ziguang Intelligent and Ziguang 4.0, the holding companies of Tsinghua Holdings, invested 3 billion yuan to acquire 237 million shares of Shenyang Machine Tool in a non-public manner.
In July 2016, Ziguang Group, National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Hubei Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, and Hubei Science Investment Corporation established Changjiang Storage on the basis of Wuhan Xinxin. Among them, Ziguang Group invested 19.7 billion yuan, accounting for 51.04%. According to statistics, the total investment of the Yangtze River storage will exceed 24 billion US dollars. This is one of the largest investment projects of Ziguang Group so far.
Before the Yangtze River storage, the two most important types of DRAM and NAND in the field of memory chips were oligopoly. More than 93% of the DRAM market was occupied by Samsung, SK hynix and Micron Technology; and the NAND Flash market was almost entirely Samsung, SK Hynix, Toshiba, SanDisk, Micron and Intel are divided into six parts. The Yangtze River Storage is China's first storage base to break through the monopoly of international giants, achieving a breakthrough from scratch, which is called China's integrated circuit industry An aircraft carrier explored in the strip.
At present, the Yangtze River Storage Division has become a semiconductor memory company that integrates chip design, process development, wafer production and testing, and sales services.
Advantage set, accelerate independent research and development
If the merger is only to buy a ticket into the field of integrated circuits, then after a series of acquisitions, Ziguang has also entered the accelerated development stage of independent research and development.
After entering 2018, Ziguang's Yangtze River storage has been put into production. As a national storage project base, the total investment of the Yangtze River storage amounted to US$24 billion. It is estimated that the total production capacity will reach 300,000 pieces/month after the completion of the first phase of the project, and the annual output value will exceed 10 billion US dollars.
At present, the first batch of 4 million US dollars of precision instruments stored in the Yangtze River has arrived in Wuhan on April 5. In the next two years, nearly 30,000 tons of precision instruments will be imported from all over the world to Han. On April 11, the Yangtze River Storage Wuhan base chip production The machine officially entered the installation, which marked that the national storage base entered the mass production preparation stage from the plant construction stage. It is understood that the equipment will be moved in, the commissioning will take about 3 months, and then start small-scale trial production, such as smooth, this year In the fourth quarter, China's first 32-layer 64G three-dimensional NAND flash memory chips with completely independent intellectual property rights are expected to be mass-produced in Optics Valley. This is the first domestic independent investment in the Yangtze River storage cost of 1 billion US dollars. Intellectual property's 32-layer 3D NAND flash memory chip, thus achieving zero breakthrough in China's 3D flash memory industry, is expected to enable China to enter the first echelon of global memory chips. Ye Tianchun, director of the Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, also gives high priority to the memory chips produced by Ziguang. Evaluation: This is the closest chip in our country to the world level so far.
Gao Qiquan, executive vice president of Ziguang Group and chairman of Changjiang Storage Executive, revealed that the 3D NAND flash memory of Changjiang Storage has received the first order, a total of 10,776 chips, which will be used for 8GB USD memory card products. It will not be long before we can see Smartphone based on domestic flash memory, SSD solid state drive.
Heavy technology, gradually achieve self-sufficiency
The development goal and direction of Ziguang Group is to become a group of enterprises with real technology. This word is a word often mentioned by Zhao Weiguo, chairman of Ziguang Group. What is heavy technology, in the eyes of Bajie, first It must have a strong technical content. Secondly, it must be fundamental and have a major impact on national strategy, information security and industrial security. Again, its technical threshold must be high, not ordinary enterprises and people. I just played it casually.
Since the completion of the merger and acquisition of Spreadtrum, Ziguang Group has invested about 6 billion yuan in research and development of new technologies. In the next few years, the total investment in research and development will definitely exceed 30 billion yuan. Including the storage field, Ziguang will invest more in the future. Amazing. Recently, Xu Jinghong, chairman of Tsinghua Holdings, announced that Tsinghua Holdings will invest 50 billion yuan in research and development funds in the next five years and launch a special fund for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements of 10 billion yuan to promote the industrialization of heavy scientific and technological achievements, 50 billion yuan. The scale of R&D investment indicates that they have also placed the creation of heavy technology clusters at the top of their development goals.
Of course, in terms of talents, Ziguang attaches great importance. Peng Hongbing, former deputy director of the Department of Electronic Information, has served as vice president of the big fund and chairman of the Yangtze River Storage Supervisory Board; Changjiang Storage Executive Chairman is Gao Qiquan, who was dug in Taiwan. Currently, the CEO of Changjiang Storage is Haigui Yang Shining. He is also the former COO of SMIC; the Yangtze River Storage CTO is Haigui Yang Weiyi. In addition, the Yangtze River Storage opened its R&D base in Silicon Valley in the fall of 2016, and hired technicians from the storage giant American Micron Technology to scale 40 people. Start research and development work.
Eight sisters believe that the war in the memory field will be cruel than we think, and will last longer than we expected. Facing the international giants in the field of integrated circuits, the Ziguang Group can only run faster and make mistakes. It is only the beginning of the test for the Ziguang Group. Under the macro environment of China’s huge economic volume and national policies, China’s integrated circuit industry will certainly occupy the world. A solid place.