On the evening of February 28, the domestic chip company Unigroup Zhanrui officially issued a new personnel appointment, appointing Ren Qiwei as the company's CEO, and Chu Qing no longer served as the company's CEO.
In the evening, a screenshot of a message suspected of Chu Qing circulated in the chip circle, Chu Qing said that he had received a resolution from the board of directors of Zhan Rui to remove his CEO and director duties, but stressed that "Zhan Rui has been out of difficulties for three years and has entered a strong upward development track." ”
At the end of 2018, Chu Qing took over Unigroup ZhanRui and became its new CEO. Prior to joining Tsinghua Unigroup, Chu Qing worked for many years in Companies such as Huawei Technologies, HiSilicon Semiconductor, and Datang Mobile. According to the latest report of counterpoint, in the fourth quarter of 2021, The global smartphone AP market share reached 11%.
For the reasons for the dismissal, Zhan Rui said on the official website that the management change is a normal personnel adjustment within the company, and the company's production and operation activities are carried out normally and orderly.
High-level changes may be affected by Unigroup reorganization
TSINGHUA Unigroup is a leading enterprise in China's integrated circuit design industry, and the only main chip platform provider with 5G chip capabilities and has been successfully commercialized in the open market of Chinese mainland.
After Tsinghua Unigroup restructured into the execution process, Unigroup Zhanrui as its subsidiary, personnel also began to change.
According to the National Enterprise Credit Information System, on February 11, the legal representative of Tsinghua Unigroup Zhanrui (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd. was changed from Zhao Weiguo to Wu Shengwu, who also served as the chairman of Tsinghua Unigroup Zhanrui.
According to the data, Wu Shengwu has a bachelor's degree in the Department of Engineering Physics of Tsinghua University and a master's degree from the Law School of Tsinghua University. Prior to joining Tsinghua Tsinghua Unigroup in 2019, he was the deputy director of the Electronic Information Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the director of the Ningbo Information Industry Bureau. In addition to Tsinghua Unigroup, he also serves as chairman of Tsinghua Unigroup's shareholding, Xueda Education (000526.SZ), and chairman of Unigroup Liansheng (Linxens).
The reporter noted that at that time, Chu Qing's position did not change. At the beginning of this year, Chu Qing was still active in the public eye and accepted interviews with relevant media on behalf of Zhan Rui.
However, on the afternoon of the 28th, the news about Chu Qing's "dismissal" began to ferment in the chip circle. Some people close to Zhan Rui told the first financial reporter that the change of position may be related to the reorganization of Unigroup.
For the change of position, Zhan Rui said in the announcement on the official website that in order to strengthen corporate governance, improve the level of operation and management, and achieve the sustainable and healthy development of the company, with the unanimous consent of the board of directors of Tsinghua Unigroup Zhan Rui, Mr. Ren Qiwei was appointed as the company's chief executive officer, and Mr. Chu Qing no longer served as the company's chief executive officer. Mr. Ren Qiwei will cooperate with Chairman Wu Shengwu to jointly lead Tsinghua Unigroup zhanrui and continue to make breakthroughs in key areas such as 5G chips.
In the official introduction, Ren Qiwei has been engaged in Philips, Qimonda, Inspur Group, Tsinghua Unigroup related semiconductor companies for more than 20 years, focusing on the research and development of integrated circuit products and mass production and sales.
Zhan Rui development "three twists and turns"
The predecessors of UNIgroup include two chip design companies, Spreadtrum and Redico. According to the official website introduction, Tsinghua Unigroup Zhanrui is a leading enterprise in the integrated circuit design industry in the mainland, and is one of the few enterprises in the world that fully grasps the full-scenario communication technologies such as 2G/3G/4G/5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, TV FM, satellite communication, etc., and has a scarce large-scale chip integration and set capabilities, including mobile communication central processing units, baseband chips, AI chips, RF front-end chips, RF chips and other communications, computing and control chips.
But it is such a company with the same name as 5G chip giants such as HiSilicon, Qualcomm, and MediaTek, but before 2019, there are many loopholes in technology and management.
After reading Zhan Rui's financial reports over the years, I felt more shocked. It took 3 days to decide to take over. "Chu Qing once said in an interview with reporters that during the investigation, he accidentally found a large number of clerical staff authors sitting in the office to process various data entry work with great inefficiency." Zhan Rui is a technology company, and at its worst, our chip technology is three generations worse than the process of first-line manufacturers. He said.
People close to Zhan Rui told reporters that in the era of functional machines to smart machines, Zhan Rui was almost out, so that later only shipped overseas, has been going around in the circle of functional machines, and even was "moved out of the circle of friends" by Samsung, until these two years, with the development of management changes, important specification changes were made to the T618/T610 chip, to June 15, 2019 T618/T610 smoothly returned to the film, and achieved mass production in January and March 20, respectively, to win back a round in the field of smart phones.
According to The latest report of Counterpoint in the fourth quarter, in Q4 2021, Zhan Rui's global smartphone AP market share reached 11%, while in 2018 and 2019, Zhan Rui's share of smart phone chips was relatively small and was counted as "others".
"Now there are very few companies with 2G to 5G complete communication technology, in terms of research and development of core technologies, Tsinghua Unigroup Zhanrui is definitely at the forefront of the country, and the only domestic companies that can benchmark is HiSilicon." What can be seen is that Unigroup Zhanrui has at least got rid of the situation of positioning the middle and low end, and the overall development direction is on the right track. Analysts in the TMT industry told reporters.
However, the dismissal of Chu Qing's CEO has cast uncertainty over Zhan Rui's future development. "Chu Qingyuan is the elder of Huawei HiSilicon, and there are also many original HiSilicon teams in the Zhan Rui team, which are the technical backbones that follow him, and the change of executives cannot be said to have no impact on the current Unigroup." People close to Zhan Rui told reporters.
In addition, it is worth noting that the current UNIgroup IPO process is the focus of the market's most attention, in May 2019, Unigroup Zhanrui announced that it will launch the preparations for the IPO of the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, but it was previously shelved due to the reorganization of Unigroup, and the change of coach in such a critical period is also quite unexpected to the outside.