As the world's largest chip consumer market, a large number of chips flow into the Chinese market through various ways every year. After that, we will further produce these chips into mobile phones, computers, new energy vehicles and drones, some of which are sold in the domestic market and some of which are exported to overseas markets.
With the rapid development of China's chips, we not only have a high demand for chips, but also for various semiconductor equipment for the production of chips. After experiencing the ban on U.S. chips and Huawei's supply cutoff, domestic manufacturers also realize the importance of mastering core technologies, and if they want to avoid being stuck, they need to be replaced by localization. Therefore, many domestic chip companies have begun to accelerate the technological development of advanced processes and accelerate the expansion of production capacity.
In this case, Nikon, a Japanese lithography machine company, has set its sights on the Chinese market, and in Nikon's plan, they want to further narrow the market share gap with ASML. After ASML revoked its shipping license and could not freely ship to the Chinese market, Nikon began to find a way to ship to the Chinese market in large quantities.
Therefore, Nikon even bluntly stated that it will not use American technology to build lithography machine equipment, and strengthen the communication bridge with Chinese customers without restrictions. However, what people did not expect was that in order to get more orders, Nikon actually directly said: At present, Chinese lithography machine manufacturers are actively developing domestic lithography machines, although there are some gaps between the technology and the current international leading level, but they will also worry about the "potential danger" of Chinese enterprises, so they will launch new products and optimize costs, and strengthen the connection with customers.
On the surface, Nikon's words don't seem to be too problematic, but if you put aside some scenes, you can understand the essence directly. Then it is equivalent to Nikon to use its own technical advantages and cost advantages to "block" domestic lithography machines to seize the market through low prices.
However, Nikon's goal is not so easy, first of all, Nikon wants to ship freely without using American technology, if it can be done so easily, then ASML will consider a similar approach. This also means that it is not so easy to bypass the United States technology and ship higher-end lithography machines with Nikon's technical level.
From the public data, in the first two months of this year, ASML shipped about 35 lithography equipment to the Chinese market, worth as much as 70 billion, which also means that Chinese companies are still more inclined to buy ASML's lithography equipment, and it is not so easy for Nikon to compete.
According to the report of the American media "Reuters", the United States is preparing to optimize the export control rules for semiconductor equipment, that is, to restrict the maintenance of lithography equipment. If ASML is subject to this restriction, then its share in the Chinese market will inevitably continue to decline, after all, no one wants to buy the equipment to become "scrap metal".
In this case, Nikon's opportunity has come, but with some previous experience, it is difficult to say whether Nikon can increase its market share in China.
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