Chips, seemingly small but extremely important. However, the United States has always regarded chips as a tool for sanctions, constantly modifying rules, suppressing and restricting Chinese companies. However, what they did not expect was that China has always faced challenges with a more and more repressive attitude, and the chip industry is no exception. Suppressing sanctions will only stimulate the awakening of Chinese companies, trigger a boom in chip construction, and reverse the chip situation.
In fact, as early as the early days of the US revision of chip rules, Microsoft founder Bill Gates warned that sanctions will only accelerate China's chip progress, and American companies will suffer more and more losses. Recently, the US media collated the 20 fastest-growing chip companies in the past year and found that 19 of them were Chinese companies. This fully shows that the series of sanctions policies initiated by the United States are indeed counterproductive.
This shows that the growth rate of China's chip industry is leading the world. In fact, there are many more examples to prove this.
The first is the decline in the number of chip imports. In recent days, chip import and export data show that the number of chip imports in May fell by 8.7% year-on-year, which is the sixth consecutive month of decline, and the import amount fell 2.4% year-on-year. In the first five months, chip import data fell by 10.9% year-on-year. This shows that the chip self-sufficiency rate is constantly increasing.
This is followed by the decline in sales of Huawei HiSilicon and the rise of UNISOC. In the field of chips, mobile phone SoC chips are high-end products, and Huawei's HiSilicon previously dominated the market share more than Qualcomm and entered the world's top ten semiconductor companies. However, due to the revision of chip rules in the United States, TSMC stopped manufacturing Huawei HiSilicon chips. Since then, HiSilicon chips have not been able to manufacture, market share has been declining, and other mobile phone manufacturers have not been able to use Huawei's chips. However, UNISOC has risen, and it is a chip supplier like Qualcomm and MediaTek. Now HiSilicon's share has declined, and Unigroup's share has continued to increase, surpassing Samsung to become the world's fourth-largest chip company, with a market share of 11% in the first quarter of this year. The top three are MediaTek, Qualcomm and Apple, Samsung is in fifth, and HiSilicon has only 1% of the share.
The third is the replacement acceleration of domestic chip equipment. The chip industry includes three main links of design, manufacturing and packaging and testing, and our company has reached the world-class level in design, and the packaging and testing technology and share are also leading in the world. The key is that there is a gap in chip manufacturing equipment, especially various equipment such as lithography machines. The independent supply of domestic equipment in chip manufacturing equipment is crucial, and now the share of domestic equipment is expanding.
Our chip manufacturing equipment has reached the international first-class level, for example, TSMC is using a 5nm etching machine. More importantly, all links of China's chip industry chain are involved, although there are still gaps in some technical levels. This is unmatched by any other country or region. In other words, as long as we continue to dig deeper into the level of technology, we can achieve the independent supply of the chip industry supply chain and completely get rid of the limitation of the chip "stuck neck". In this regard, relevant American companies have seen the growth rate of our chip industry more clearly, so they began to be anxious.
In recent years, the share of chip manufacturing in the United States has dropped from 37% to about 12% at present, and there is a dependence on chip manufacturing. Therefore, the United States plans to allocate $52 billion to subsidize the local chip industry and increase manufacturing capacity. However, the chip bill on subsidies has been slow to pass, and now they see the growth rate of China's chip industry, and the CEOs of more than 120 technology giants such as Microsoft and Google have jointly written a letter calling for the passage of the bill as soon as possible to implement chip subsidies. Intel even made it clear that if chip subsidies are not in place, they expect the $100 billion factory plan to be delayed.
In fact, the importance of chips has long attracted our attention, and even without the blockade of the United States, we will strive to move forward. However, the US sanctions policy has accelerated the awakening of Chinese companies and accelerated the pace of our development. Today, our chip industry is moving towards greater progress, I hope we can move forward down-to-earth and steadily, and surpass it as soon as possible!
