Picking up chip heat | China will become the world's largest semiconductor equipment market next year

In China's technology industry, semiconductors are a weak sector, and they need to spend a lot of foreign exchange imported chips every year. But now, China has set off a chip fever, and more and more companies have announced their entry into the semiconductor field. According to Chinese media reports, next year, China mainland will Will surpass South Korea and become the world's largest semiconductor equipment market.

Semiconductors are technology-intensive industries, while semiconductor manufacturing is capital-intensive. A single chip production line requires billions of dollars and billions of dollars in investment. The astronomical investment threshold also makes semiconductor manufacturing or foundry a minority in the world. The characteristics of the giants take all over.

According to a report from the Taiwan Semiconductor Media Association (SEMI), in 2018, South Korea will become the world's largest semiconductor equipment market for the second consecutive year.

By 2019, the sales volume of semiconductor manufacturing equipment in China will reach 173 billion US dollars, an increase of 46.6% year-on-year, which will surpass South Korea to become the world's largest market.

SEMI predicts that this year, the global sales of semiconductor equipment will reach 627 billion US dollars, an increase of 10.8%. This scale will also exceed the historical record of 566 billion US dollars created last year.

In the past few years, China's semiconductor market has developed rapidly, and more and more companies have expressed interest in entering the chip field.

Take the memory chip as an example. In the past, domestic memory chips were completely imported. However, this year, the memory production line of Fujian Jinhua IC is expected to be put into production. In addition, the Yangtze River Storage Company is also building memory and flash memory chip production lines.

In the past few months, Gree, Konka and other traditional home appliance companies also said that they will enter the chip field. Among them, Konka Group's business focus is on memory chip production and chip packaging and testing business.

The semiconductor industry is generally divided into two major categories: chip design companies and manufacturing companies. At present, Huawei, Xiaomi, Spreadtrum and other companies have the ability to design mobile phone chips, and mobile phones equipped with their own chips have also been on sale.

In the field of chip manufacturing, China also has well-known manufacturers such as SMIC, TSMC, and Lianhua Electronics. Among them, TSMC has invented the semiconductor professional OEM business model in the world, which is the industry giant that occupies half of the industry.