The third semiconductor transfer, the destination is mainland China

As we all know, in the whole process of chips, wafer manufacturing is the most critical and the core part with the largest market share. Its high technical content and complex process play a vital role in the chip production process.

After the rise of TSMC, the design, packaging and testing of integrated circuits were gradually separated from IDM, and finally the professional link of wafer foundry was formed.

The chip foundry industry, after being separated from IDM, has also expanded its market size year by year, and the global wafer manufacturing market has grown rapidly. Data show that in the first quarter of 2021, the top 10 chip foundries in the world have a revenue of US$22.89 billion, a year-on-year growth rate of 20.7%. In the whole year of 2021, the chip foundry market will be close to 100 billion US dollars.

Coupled with the global shortage of cores in the second half of last year, these foundries are also continuously expanding their production capacity to meet the growing market demand.

But from a practical point of view, with the growth of these production capacities, we are increasingly seeing a reality that production capacity is gradually shifting to mainland China, which means that the third semiconductor transfer is really coming.

As shown in the figure above, this is the statistics of a certain organization. In the past three years, the expansion plans of the world’s major foundry companies include major manufacturers such as TSMC, intel, Samsung, UMC, GF, and SMIC.

From this figure, we can see that most of the production capacity growth areas are located in mainland China. At the same time, manufacturers in mainland China have expanded chip production lines. The planned production capacity release time is mainly concentrated in 202-2022. between.

According to SEMI data, there are 62 semiconductor fabs put into production worldwide from 2017 to 2020, of which 26 are located in mainland China, accounting for 42% of the global total, and it is expected that at least 38 new fabs will be added from 2020 to 2024. 12-inch fab.

In the past few decades, the semiconductor industry has undergone two transfers. One was in the 1980s, when it was transferred from the United States to Japan. As a result, Japanese semiconductors rose, and even once became the world’s largest chip exporter, surpassing the United States.

Later, the United States intervened and abolished the Japanese semiconductor industry, so it made a second transfer in the 1990s, from Japan to South Korea and Taiwan, China, and there was the rise of Samsung and TSMC.

Now it is obvious that from the perspective of these expanded production capacities, the semiconductor industry is undergoing a third transfer, with the destination being mainland China. Next, the domestic semiconductor industry chain will usher in a new round of real business cycles.