China's semiconductor capacity expansion is not enough?

China's semiconductor capacity expansion is not enough?

Although SMIC expressed its confidence in rapidly approaching the international advanced level, challenges still exist. "The global semiconductor industry shows a stronger polarization trend." Lin Rongjian, President of Xinsi Technology Asia Pacific, pointed out in his speech on the development trend of global semiconductor industry in 2016, "Taking the foundry industry as an example, TSMC's market share accounted for 55.40% of the global foundry market in 2015, 52.85% in 2014, 49.33% in 2013 and 46.49% in 2012, showing a centralized trend. If compared horizontally, the market shares of other foundry enterprises in 2015 were grofangde's 10.36%, liandian's 9.19%, Samsung's 6.28% and SMIC's 4.66% respectively." It can be seen from the above data that SMIC has great difficulty in surpassing the former.

Specific to SMIC itself, there are also challenges in development. In the interview, some experts pointed out: "in recent years, SMIC has placed too much emphasis on profitability, which will inevitably lead to insufficient investment in new production capacity, which may affect the long-term competitiveness of the enterprise."

According to the data previously disclosed by several enterprises, TSMC's capital expenditure in 2015 was US $8.12 billion, that of grofangde and liandian were US $5.6 billion and US $2.095 billion respectively, and that of SMIC was US $1.57 billion in 2015. In terms of investment and construction of new plants, in 2014 and 2015, liandian and TSMC decided to invest in the establishment of 12 inch wafer plants in Xiamen and Nanjing respectively. Although SMIC also has the construction of 8-inch plants in Shenzhen, it is still inferior in scale.

As for the 28nm process, some operators are worried about the climbing speed of SMIC's 28nm production capacity. According to the goal of SMIC, the sales revenue of 28nm process node is planned to account for 5% ~ 8% of the company's total sales revenue in 2016. If the sales proportion reaches 15%, it can be regarded as the passing line of important work nodes. At least in 2016, the main process platform of SMIC is still 65 / 55nm.