According to customs data, integrated circuit products have long been the single largest import commodity in China. In 2018, the import value of China's integrated circuits was 205.51 billion yuan (about 312.06 billion US dollars), an increase of 19.8% over the same period of the previous year, and exceeded 100 billion US dollars for the first time. The export value of integrated circuits was only 84.64 billion US dollars, an increase of 26.6%. The import and export deficit of China's integrated circuit products is still expanding, reaching US$227.42 billion, up 17.47% year-on-year; the deficit of imports and exports of integrated circuit products reached 200.47 billion, up 16.20% year-on-year.
Market research firm Gartner released a 2018 global top 10 chip buyers in early 2019. China has four seats, namely Huawei, Lenovo, BBK and Xiaomi. The four Chinese companies spent nearly $60 billion a year to purchase chips in 2018, with Huawei accounting for a maximum of $21.1 billion, a 45% increase from 2017.
Every year, our manufacturers spend huge sums of money to buy foreign chips, and both consumers and manufacturers have to bear high costs. Still, you may not be able to buy it. In the context of Sino-US trade frictions, ZTE and Huawei, which have been sanctioned, are a good example.
Therefore, although the domestic IC replacement is an old topic, it has recently been widely mentioned. The development of domestic chips has received great attention and support from the government, the community and domestic manufacturers. China also has excellent domestic chip makers like Haisi, Ziguang Zhanrui, Haowei Technology, ZTE Microelectronics, Huiding, Huada Semiconductor, Silan Micro, etc., but have to admit that domestic chips and international semiconductors The gap between the plants is still very large.
Professor Wei Shaojun of Tsinghua University once said that China still lacks competitive high-end chips. Despite the rapid rise of consumer electronics chips such as communications and multimedia, CPUs, DSPs, FPGAs, and memories that are strategically important are still lagging behind. Although chip design companies and capital are pursuing hot spots to do AI chips, some basic passive components and analog chips have obvious gaps, and local IC design companies have always lacked the ability to define their own design processes. Most of them rely on EDA. Design Tools.
Among more than 1,400 IC design companies in China, more than 600 annual revenues are less than 10 million yuan, and the cost of several consecutive films cannot be earned.
For a long time, foreign semiconductor manufacturers have built a commercial system of division of labor and cooperation around the world with leading products and technologies. In the entire semiconductor industry chain, the chip factory has the pricing power, and has obtained the most lucrative profits through control channels and production capacity. It can be said that the gap between foreign semiconductor giants and domestic chips is not only in products and technologies, but also in marketing, brand promotion and the formulation and maintenance of business rules.
Wu Zheng, vice president of the Shenzhen Chip Industry Association, said that China is already the world's largest electronics market, and the local domestic IC brand should be the most grounded. Compared with foreign counterparts, domestic chips have more localization advantages and are closer to the market. They should have certain advantages in products, prices and services.