In recent years, many local chip companies in China have made progress, reached new milestones, and occupied a significant share of the global semiconductor market. Let's take a look at the 10 largest listed Chinese chipmakers worth watching.
Weier Semiconductor:
Weier Semiconductor completed its acquisitions of OmniVision and Superpix, both of which are image sensor manufacturers, in 2019. OmniVision ranks third in the world, accounting for 9%, behind Sony (42%) and Samsung (22%). After that, revenue increased from RMB3.96 billion in 2018 (adjusted to RMB9.7) to RMB13.63 billion in 2019. Of all products and services, CMOS contributed the most, accounting for about 71.94% of total revenue.
SMIC:
SMIC, one of the world's largest foundries, won orders from Huawei after achieving an unprecedented leap in lithography from 28nm to 14nm. This process spans two generations at a time, mainly due to the involvement of Liang Mengsong. He was the head of TSMC's R&D department, helping Samsung jump straight to 14nm after leaving TSMC.
AMEC：
AMEC, an advanced micromachining equipment company, develops electronic equipment for front-end semiconductor manufacturing, back-end wafer-level packaging, LED production, microelectromechanical system (MEMS) applications, and other integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing processes. Its downstream is largely localized: more than 83% of revenue in 2019 came from customers Chinese mainland. Meanwhile, the domestic semiconductor manufacturing equipment market has more than tripled in the past five years, reaching nearly $13.5 billion in 2019.
Montage Technology:
Montage started as a manufacturer of TV chipsets in the 1990s and has grown into One of China's top memory interface chip design companies.
GigaDevice Innovation:
GigaDevice Innovations, a fabless flash memory developer developing standalone products in the NAND flash and MCU space, has partnered with Changxin Storage Technologies (CXMT), a four-year-old challenger that is expected to occupy China's remaining position in the global dynamic random access memory (DRAM) market.
Huiding Technology:
Huiding Technology is a fingerprint recognition and touch chip seller, and these two types of products accounted for 99.65% of the total revenue in 2019. It has cooperated with terminal giants such as Huawei, OPPO, vivo, and Samsung. Due to the large-scale commercialization of new products, the company achieved a gross profit margin of 60.40% in 2019.
Northern Huachuang:
Noorn Huachuang has achieved mass production of high-end semiconductor equipment, including 12-inch silicon etching machines, metal PVDs, vertical oxidation/reduction furnaces and wet cleaners. Among the two major business segments, the electronic manufacturing equipment business achieved operating income of 3.19 billion yuan and the electronic components business achieved 847 million yuan, accounting for 78.64% and 20.88% of the total revenue in 2019.
Shanghai silicon industry:
Shanghai Silicon Industry is one of the largest semiconductor wafer manufacturers in China, mainly providing products up to 300 mm. The global semiconductor silicon wafer industry has a high market concentration. In recent years, the market share of the world's top five semiconductor wafer factories has been more than 90%, showing an oligopoly pattern. The company is relatively small, accounting for 1.26% of the global market in 2018. More than 70% of revenue in 2019 came from markets outside Chinese mainland.
Johnson Microelectronics:
Joyson Microelectronics is a chip enterprise in the field of RF front-end segmentation in China. The company's two broad categories of RF products, switches and low-noise amplifiers, accounted for 79.86% and 16.87% of the total revenue in 2019, respectively. Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo are all customers of Joyson Microelectronics. In addition, according to recent data, more than 71% of its revenue comes from overseas markets.
Changjiang Electronics (JCET):
Provide one-stop service for microsystem integration, packaging and testing. It has a close relationship with SMIC because Zhou Zixue, chairman of Changjiang Electronics, holds the same position at SMIC. These two parties constitute the vacant part of the domestic chip industry. According to TrendForce, in the global packaging and test market for 2019Q3, JCET ranked behind Sun Moon (36%, including Siliconware Precision Industries' 13% market share) and Amcor (19%) with a percentage of 17%. By region, 78.61% of its revenue in 2019 came from overseas markets.
The 10 companies' business scope covers the three main steps of the chip manufacturing process: design, manufacturing, packaging and testing. While it appears that Chinese companies have the ability to fully produce domestic chips, there are also some issues to consider.
1) Intellectual property rights licensing. The vast majority of fabless companies need to buy IP from overseas companies like ARM and Cadence to put their designs on top.
2) In some key technologies, the gap between Chinese enterprises and foreign companies is more obvious. For example, SMIC can produce 14-nanometer chips, while TSMC can produce 7nm and 5nm, which is a very critical technology that involves 5G equipment.
3) Trace the upstream of the industrial chain, it is difficult to avoid American technology in the whole process.