Nowadays, the importance of chips is increasing, and it has been called the "food" of modern industry, after all, whether it is cutting-edge scientific research equipment or ordinary electronic equipment, it is inseparable from it. Therefore, chip manufacturing technology has attracted the attention of all places.
However, in the global foundry market, the top four are TSMC, Samsung, UMC and GF. Although SMIC is the most technologically advanced wafer company in mainland China, it has always ranked fifth in the world, but now it has suddenly changed.
Of course, it is not easy for SMIC to be able to do this. Because the development of our chip industry is facing many difficulties, the gap with the West was very big at the beginning, and later we wanted to work hard, but we were restricted and obstructed by the West.
The United States has a considerable advantage, as the birthplace of semiconductors, it naturally has a large number of basic and core technology patents in chips. With these advantages, global chip giants such as Intel and Qualcomm have emerged in the United States.
U.S. chip companies have basically monopolized the global semiconductor market, and they have easily obtained excess profits with advanced chip technology.
Therefore, when we began to develop chips, the United States began to obstruct restrictions, especially the emergence of Huawei's Kirin chips, whose performance is comparable to Apple's A series and Qualcomm Snapdragon, and also broke Qualcomm's position in the domestic chip market.
As a result, after Huawei's 5G took the lead again, the United States seized the opportunity to use the chip advantage to impose sanctions, not only allowing Intel and Qualcomm to cut off the supply of high-end chips such as 5G, but also asking TSMC to stop foundry Kirin, directly making Huawei coreless available.
Even if SMIC is very strong, because it does not have EUV and relies on American equipment, it can only be powerless.
However, this is also understandable, after all, the United States' position in the global semiconductor industry chain is too strong, even the global wafer foundry giant TSMC and lithography machine giant ASML can only obey in front of others and be restricted according to their requirements.
But what the US side never expected was that the suppression and restrictions did not stop the development of our chips, but made Chinese enterprises completely awaken and embark on the road of self-development, and SMIC also accelerated its expansion, successively building four wafer factories in four places.
As a result, our chip production capacity has increased rapidly, the number of chip imports has been decreasing, and American companies have ushered in huge losses.
This can also be seen from SMIC's revenue, the share from the domestic market rose to 81% in the fourth quarter of last year, while the proportion of revenue from the US market fell to 16%, which allowed domestic companies to gradually get rid of foreign dependence and increase the domestic production rate.
From the 2023 global captive wafer fab rankings, TSMC ranks first with a market share of 66.06%, UMC ranks second with a share of 6.81%, GF ranks third with a share of 6.58%, and SMIC ranks fourth with a share of 6.03%.
It can be seen that UMC, GF, and SMIC have similar shares, and SMIC can become the second with a little effort.
Because from the perspective of annual growth rate, all major wafer fabs have declined, but SMIC has the smallest decline, which indicates that the growth rate is faster. Sure enough, this goal was quickly achieved after the first quarter 2024 results were released.
SMIC's revenue in the first quarter of this year was US$1.75 billion, both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter, exceeding expectations.
In comparison, UMC's first-quarter revenue was $1.71 billion, and GF's first-quarter revenue was $1.549 billion, and SMIC has surpassed it, counting Samsung, ranking third in the global wafer foundry industry and second in pure wafer foundry.
The ability to catch up with UMC and GF in terms of revenue fully demonstrates that SMIC has made important progress in the field of chip foundry. If this trend continues, it is possible to achieve comprehensive surpassing, and even widen the gap in share.
According to SMIC, revenue growth in the first quarter was mainly due to urgent orders for smartphones.
In fact, it is also because SMIC has been working hard in the past two years, although the development of advanced processes is limited, it has seized the opportunity to rapidly expand mature processes, invested 170 billion yuan to build four wafer factories, and now the production capacity advantage has begun to be reflected.
Although affected by the restrictions of the United States, it has also promoted our enterprises to accelerate their own research, and the level of domestic semiconductor manufacturing equipment has also improved rapidly.
Although all kinds of external obstruction and restrictions will bring a lot of impact, they can also become the driving force for us to move forward. As the saying goes, there are no scars, where is the skin rough and the flesh is thick, the more severe the foreign restrictions, the faster we can achieve breakthroughs!