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Text | Speak softly
Editor|Speak softly
preface
In recent years, the monopoly suppression of American chip companies in the global market has become more and more obvious. As we all know, Huawei and Lenovo are enterprises established in the mainland at almost the same time, and the time difference between them is only three years, but the growth speed and trajectory are diametrically opposite.
Huawei is developing step by step into the backbone of national enterprises according to its plan, with HiSilicon's self-developed Kirin chip and the first 5G baseband, coupled with its various powerful functions and excellent quality, Huawei's high-end mobile phone series are highly sought after at home and abroad, sales once caught up with Apple, but also close to Samsung and other brands, excellent growth rate has also become national pride.
With the ban of Lao Mei, Huawei was forced to stop its business during the period of rapid development and gradually fell out of the ranks of competition. Huawei was suppressed for chip "stuck neck", and the Kirin series chips developed by HiSilicon could only be suspended because TSMC could not continue to manufacture them, leaving only a design drawing to be realized.
This has made Huawei's mobile phones completely no longer competitive, and its share has also fallen off a cliff. On the other hand, US companies, including Apple, have recaptured the market under this "opportunity".
According to data, before Huawei was sanctioned, Apple's market share in the mainland had fallen to less than 8%, but after that, Apple's share of mobile phones soared to 29%, which can be described as a resurrection.
Why must it be the key support of national enterprises?
The reason why Apple has been able to dominate high-end mobile phones for many years is mainly because it has its own processor chip A series and IOS mobile phone operating system.
Apple's IOS system is closed-loop for its own use, and other manufacturers' mobile phones can basically only use Google's Android operating system, so they still have a certain gap in system operation, even Samsung, the world's first sales volume. These two trump cards also make Apple fearless, and occupy Huawei's vacant high-end market share.
On the other hand, what affects the performance of mobile phones is the SoC processor, which is the core chip of the mobile phone, which determines the function and performance of the smart phone.
According to a recent report released by China's smartphone SoC market, HiSilicon's share was already less than 0.4% in the first quarter, basically tending to zero. This also means that Huawei's reserves are running out, and it is only a matter of time before it withdraws from the processor market.
In this regard, the world's more powerful, is Apple's A series, its technology is more than one generation ahead of other manufacturers, so the performance of Apple's mobile phone is very strong. The second is Qualcomm's Snapdragon series, which is constantly approaching the Apple A series.
At this stage, the top five SoC manufacturers in global sales are MediaTek 32%, Qualcomm 28%, Apple 26%, Unigroup 8%, and Samsung 4%. However, affected by the decrease in market demand, these mobile phone chip manufacturers have also declined to varying degrees, and MediaTek is currently in a leading position and ranks first.
But it should be noted that although MediaTek's chip shipments are the world's first, but most of them are the production of low-end chips, and the demand for low-end mobile phones is in the more serious decline in this part, the chip giant's situation is not as optimistic as its data shows, but also puts it in a relatively passive position.
The foundry of the Kirin chip mentioned above, TSMC, also plays a very important role in the early market competition. TSMC is one of the world's leading semiconductor foundries, with advanced manufacturing processes and technologies, and has the world's largest customer resources, almost all of the chip design giants you can think of are TSMC customers.
TSMC can produce various types of chips, including processors, memories, graphics chips, etc. Its customers include Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm and other world-renowned enterprises.
It is precisely because its manufacturing process is ahead of other foundries that many companies rely more on finding other foundry chips to promote their products.
TSMC can also provide customers with high-performance, high-performance chip solutions. In addition, TSMC also has the ability to mass production, which also makes its competitive advantage more obvious, the huge chip production capacity has also attracted one customer after another to hand over orders to TSMC, it can be said that TSMC plays a vital role in the commercial layout of some enterprises.
US enterprises are in trouble, and national enterprises are facing a huge crisis
After understanding the above market competition composition, let's go back and look at the layout of US companies. In the above SoC list, there are only two American companies, Qualcomm and Apple.
For a long time, Qualcomm and Apple have focused on the high-end market of chip manufacturers, which is why they have no fear, in the cold winter of electronic consumption, they not only did not suffer much, but found the opportunity to start "sitting on the ground".
Taking Apple as an example, Apple's A16 chip uses TSMC's 4nm process, and the price of each chip is $110, which is more than twice as expensive as the previous generation of chips priced at $45.8.
As mentioned above, Apple's system has long been used in a closed loop, and its A-series processors have always been for their own use and have never been sold, so its pricing will not affect the entire SoC market too much.
Our strongest partner and opponent - Qualcomm, the world's top new product supplier of Meixin is different, Qualcomm is the main supplier of domestic smartphones, and its Snapdragon processor largely determines the price trend of the domestic mobile phone market.
It is understood that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen2 processor also uses TSMC's 4nm process, and its price has reached a single $160, equivalent to 1134 yuan. Compared with the previous generation of Snapdragon 8Gen1, it has risen by $40, which is tantamount to sending a signal that Qualcomm is about to "harvest" the market.
The price of a single processor has exceeded a thousand, not to mention the pricing of the overall mobile phone, which also makes the domestic smartphone market face a big crisis. Due to the restrictions of the United States on core equipment and materials such as EUV lithography machines, the procurement channels and quantities of the mainland have been greatly reduced, resulting in Chinese companies basically unable to grab back the market share of SoCs in a short period of time at this stage, so even if the price of Qualcomm is expensive, it can only be bought hard.
Huawei's HiSilicon is facing this problem, although it can design top-notch chips, but the current domestic foundry can not manufacture them, and OPPO, which was originally developing Soc chips, was forced by the pressure of US sanctions, and could only announce its abandonment not long ago.
The road of independent research and development is long and arduous, cheering for national enterprises
It is foreseeable that with the rise in the price of Qualcomm chips, domestic mobile phone manufacturers will inevitably be forced to submit, and because the "Qualcomm tax" is a proportional commission, which means that the higher the price of domestic mobile phones, the more commission Qualcomm will share.
Of course, this is under the premise that Huawei's Kirin chip is nowhere to be foundry, you know, long before Huawei was sanctioned, HiSilicon's Kirin SoC processor can be comparable to Apple's A series and Qualcomm Snapdragon, and some functions have even surpassed.
For example, we all pay attention to Huawei's Kirin Global took the lead in completing its own 5G baseband, Apple is still unable to break through, and Qualcomm is more than a year late.
However, due to US sanctions, Huawei Kirin temporarily stopped at the 9000 series, and since the second quarter of last year, Huawei's share in the global mobile phone market has tended to zero. However, it is reported that the design of Huawei's Kirin has not stopped, and HiSilicon is still continuing to develop it.
Of course, Qualcomm's move to raise prices will also have certain risks, and many foreign media have paid attention to this incident, issuing articles to pay attention to the lessons of the Micron incident.
Compared with Micron's more rogue practices, as well as its malicious monopoly and bad behavior of failing product quality inspection, Qualcomm's sharp price increase has not yet brought such a serious impact. However, it is also an indisputable fact that it uses its own value to monopolize and force domestic mobile phone manufacturers to have no choice, so our top priority is to strive to improve the level of the local semiconductor chip industry.
With the continuous fermentation and upgrading of Huawei's suppressed time, the chip industry has also been put on the important agenda. Under the unreasonable suppression one after another, "China Chip" had to speed up self-research and embarked on the road of independent research and development. According to relevant data, in 2004, the total number of chips of "China Chip" was only 9.4 billion, and in 2022, the number of self-produced chips will reach 324.19 billion, an increase of 34 times in just 18 years.
With the continuous improvement of the strength of "China Core", the mainland will also completely abandon the idea of "making is better than buying", and begin to speak with science and technology and strength, giving ourselves confidence and old beauty to be positive and tough, and the long-dormant lion has once again shown its own style.
After the Huawei incident, Chinese enterprises have begun to diversify their layout, and have built a complete industrial chain, coupled with win-win cooperation with brother enterprises, huddle for warmth, and "de-beautification" has also achieved initial results.
epilogue
The main goal of China's chip industry will not only be limited to solving the current "stuck neck" problem, nor gambling to catch up with Meixin, but to make full use of the existing technology and data in the mainland to achieve chip self-sufficiency as soon as possible.
According to reports, the mainland is expected to achieve the goal of self-sufficiency rate of 70% by 2025, whether it is Micron, Intel, Qualcomm or AMD, we successfully catch up and let them "be abandoned" will be the trend.
In recent years, the production capacity of domestic chips has also made great progress, and Chinese chip companies are also accelerating the speed of self-research and have achieved breakthroughs in many core technologies. As the foreign media care and understand, "China Chip" will make a pain, focus on self-research, and completely get rid of its dependence on Meixin.
Our nation has never been a nation afraid of things, under the suppression of American companies, we have accelerated the development of "China Core", although the road of research and development is long and difficult, but I believe that our national spirit of unity and not afraid of difficulties will support us to ultimately achieve the goal!