In the past ten years, the rapid development of the smart phone industry has obviously driven the market demand for mobile phone chips, so mobile phone chips have almost supported the entire semiconductor industry and are the main force of the market that cannot be shaken.
However, under the influence of many, the mobile phone market has not grown as before, and the data released by the research agency Canalys shows that global smartphone shipments in the first quarter of 2022 fell by 11% year-on-year, showing a large decline.
The glow of smart phones is no longer, the demand for mobile phone chips will naturally decline, and the first quarter financial report disclosed by the front desk of the japanese front desk shows that the share of the contribution of smart phones fell to the second place for the first time, and fell off the altar for the first time.
The number one business is HPC, which we often call high-performance computing, which has played a key role in AI infrastructure and high-performance computing CPUs and GPUs with the large-scale development of artificial intelligence.
But more noteworthy is the automotive electronics sector, which contributed 5% of TSMC's share in the quarter, with a growth rate of up to 26%, which means that the future potential of automotive electronics is huge.
The strong growth of the automotive electronics sector, mainly due to the development direction of automotive intelligence, TSMC has estimated that in the future four major technology platforms, automotive electronics will play one of the important momentum to promote revenue and profits.
Compared with traditional fuel vehicles, the current new energy intelligent vehicles require more than 1,000 chips, and the use of MCU chips alone has doubled, with the continuous advancement of the development of automobile intelligence, the future intelligent car is expected to become a four-wheeled supercomputer.
In this context, some foreign media believe that SMIC is basically stable, because the direction of this Chinese mainland semiconductor foundry company is very clear, and the goal of various investments is also to eat the fat meat of the automotive electronics sector.
At present, SMIC has mastered the process technology of more than 7nm process, and achieved large-scale mass production of 14nm/28nm process, and the revenue contribution of this node in 2021 will reach 15.1%.
Although the 14nm process is not advanced, even the chips of the mid-range mobile phone processor have been upgraded to 7nm, but in fact, the 14nm process is enough to meet the production needs of most low-end chips, and automotive chips, MCU chips, and industrial equipment chips are completely sufficient.
So we have also seen the rapid development of SMIC in the past two years, the company's revenue scale in 2021 was $5.443 billion, an increase of 39.3% year-on-year, and the annual profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was $1.702 billion, an increase of 137.8% year-on-year.
The sharp increase in SMIC's net profit is due to the continuous growth of the share of processes such as 14nm.
SMIC has a better future, with three large-scale expansions to its factory in 2021, investing $4.5 billion.
The author believes that after the expansion of the factory scale, the production capacity of SMIC's 14nm/28nm process will be further improved, and it will be able to better embrace the new future, perhaps in the automotive electronics sector, SMIC will grow into the world's third largest semiconductor foundry company.
It is precisely because of this that foreign media said that SMIC is equivalent to stability.
Although in the short term, it is not possible to compete with companies such as TSMC and Samsung, in the long run, the author believes that SMIC can bring more surprises. What do you think about this, welcome to comment, like, share.