According to customs data, integrated circuit products have long been the largest single import goods in China. In 2018, China's import of integrated circuits amounted to 2058.41 billion yuan (about 312.06 billion US dollars), a year-on-year increase of 19.8%, exceeding 300 billion US dollars for the first time; while the export of integrated circuits was only 84.64 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 26.6%. The import and export deficit of China's integrated circuit products is still expanding, reaching US $227.42 billion, an increase of 17.47% year on year; the import and export deficit of integrated circuit products is up to RMB 2004.07 billion, an increase of 16.20% year on year.
In early 2019, Gartner, a market research institution, released a list of the top 10 chip buyers in the world in 2018, with China occupying four seats, namely Huawei, Lenovo, Bubugao and Xiaomi. In 2018, the four Chinese enterprises spent nearly $60 billion to purchase chips, of which Huawei spent the most, about $21.1 billion, an increase of 45% over 2017.
Every year our manufacturers spend a lot of money to buy foreign chips, both consumers and manufacturers have to bear high costs for them. Still, it's not necessarily available. Against the background of trade frictions between China and the United States, ZTE and Huawei, which have been sanctioned, are good examples.
Therefore, although domestic IC substitution is an old topic, it has been widely mentioned recently. The development of domestic chips has received great attention and support from the government, all walks of life and domestic manufacturers. China also has excellent domestic chip manufacturers similar to Hisilicon, Ziguang zhanrui, howay technology, ZTE microelectronics, huiding, Huada semiconductor, Shilan micro, etc., but we have to admit that the gap between domestic chips and international semiconductor manufacturers is still huge.
Professor Wei Shaojun of Tsinghua University once said that China still lacks competitive high-end chips. Despite the rapid rise of consumer electronic chips such as communication and multimedia, the CPU, DSP, FPGA and memory which have important strategic significance are still lagging behind. Although chip design companies and capital are pursuing hot spots to make AI chips, there is a significant gap between some basic passive components and analog chips. Moreover, local IC design companies still lack the ability to define their own design process, and most of them need to rely on the design tools provided by EDA companies.
Among more than 1400 IC design enterprises in China, more than 600 have an annual income of less than 10 million yuan, and can't earn back the cost of several films.
For a long time, foreign semiconductor manufacturers have built a business system of division of labor and cooperation in the world with their leading products and technologies. In the whole semiconductor industry chain, the chip manufacturers have the pricing power and gain the most lucrative profits through controlling 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.
Shenzhen Huaqiangbei is the first electronic street in the world and the largest distribution center of semiconductor components in Asia. For those in the electronics industry, Huaqiangbei's reputation comes from the world's largest electronic component trading market. The growth of Huaqiangbei market depends on the electronic factories throughout the Pearl River Delta in the early days of reform and opening up, especially the foreign factories in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is the existence of these factories that created the special IC spot market of Huaqiangbei. At the same time, Huaqiangbei's spot market has come back to feed more small and medium-sized electronic factories. This unique sales and trade mode in the world has enabled Huaqiangbei to gain an advantageous position in the circulation of the global electronic industry chain, and finally achieved the unique advantage of "made in China".
On June 15, the domestic brand supply and demand docking meeting hosted by Shenzhen Wanzhong Yixin technology and Culture Development Co., Ltd. was held in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen. More than 100 local independent distributors from Huaqiangbei gathered here to participate in the meeting.
At this docking meeting, Wu Zheng, vice president of Shenzhen chip industry association, said that China has become the largest electronic market in the world, and the 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.
"Don't worry about giving the benefits to your agents. As long as our domestic IC can obtain enough market share, the state will vigorously support it, no matter in terms of policies or funds." Wu Zheng believes that the original domestic IC manufacturers should look into the future, with the help of the strong channel promotion ability of local agents, promote the domestic chips to the capillaries of the market, which is also the significance of this brand docking meeting.
As the exclusive invited media of this domestic brand supply and demand docking meeting, the reporter of "core pickpocket" who participated in the whole process also brought the introduction of 10 domestic chip manufacturers to all readers for the first time:
Nanjing Zhongke Microelectronics Co., Ltd. is a Fabless IC integrated circuit design company jointly funded by the Institute of microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Nanjing Internet of things company. With ultra-low power consumption, short distance, radio frequency communication technology as the core, we provide chip level solutions for RFID, wireless data transmission, medical electronics and other market applications.