A while ago, at Huawei 's winter new product launch conference, consumer business CEO Yu Chengdong said, "No winter will pass. After the cold winter, spring will bloom!"
This man once held up Huawei with one hand. Half of the country’s consumer business talkers, after excitedly showing off Huawei’s AITO to the world, released the P50 Pocket, a folding screen product that focuses on technological aesthetics and smart imaging.
Huawei will have a difficult time in 2021 without the market share it once enjoyed. Until now, Huawei has still been unable to solve problems such as mobile phone support for 5G, limited supply chains, and the inability to freely purchase components.
Some people in the industry said that Huawei’s Kirin chip inventory has bottomed out, and Huawei will still have a difficult time in the future.
TSMC’s New Year’s advance payment reaches a new high
As soon as the May 15 ban in the United States came out, TSMC made it clear that after September 14, 2020, the company has no plans to continue supplying to Huawei. Although TSMC also tried to obtain a license from the United States in order to resume supply to Huawei, the United States regarded Huawei as its number one enemy.
After TSMC stopped supplying Huawei, Qualcomm Apple has been favorably affected. Qualcomm signed a big contract with Huawei, and Apple took the opportunity to quickly eat into the high-end mobile phone market left by Huawei.
The former Huawei mobile phone once stood at the top of the world's mobile phone sales. However, cutting off supply to Huawei did not have much impact on TSMC. In an environment where the world is in a panic about chips, TSMC's production capacity continues to be in demand. Dozens of customers, including
AMD, Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm, have paid in advance to ensure subsequent shipment capabilities. According to supply chain industry sources, TSMC will receive more than US$5.42 billion (approximately RMB 34.5 billion) in advance payments this year. Revenue is expected to continue hitting new highs.
This is really rare in the industry, because unless there are special circumstances, the advance payment for general orders is only a small part. TSMC's receipt of such a huge advance payment also means that the global chip industry will remain busy in 2022.
In addition, some insiders have revealed that the iPhone 15 model that Apple will release next will use its own self-developed chips from the 5G chip to the processor. By then, TSMC will be Apple’s exclusive chip manufacturer for this model. .
In other words, TSMC has won a big order from Apple. From 2022 to 2023, this chip giant, which has been competing with and Samsung for the top spot in the industry, will not be idle.
Technology is the primary productive force, and it can be best explained at TSMC. TSMC's current sales account for the highest proportion of 5nm chips and 7nm chips, and 3nm will soon be put into trial production within the year. The latest information shows that the 2nm chip process technology has also been licensed and will be trial-produced soon.
According to media reports, TSMC said that the industry "megatrends" of 5G and high-performance computing-related products will continue to drive the company's long-term growth.
In contrast, SMIC, the leading chip manufacturing company in mainland my country, currently only has the capacity to produce 14nm process chips, lagging behind TSMC by 2-3 generations. Domestic chips have a long way to go.
Hard-core technology is the core productivity
After Huawei was repeatedly suppressed by the United States, major domestic manufacturers have deeply realized the influence of hard-core technology on the future of the company.
Tencent , as a representative Internet manufacturer, can be seen in the 2021 Q3 quarterly financial report released a while ago. While revenue increased by 13%, it also continued to increase investment in new infrastructure and research and development.
The financial report shows that Tencent’s R&D expenditures in the third quarter of this year reached 13.73 billion yuan, a record high for a single quarter this year; Tencent’s cumulative R&D investment in the first three quarters of this year reached 37.859 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 36%.
Tencent is even more unambiguous in its investment in hard-core technology.Currently, Tencent has released three self-developed chips, namely Zixiao for AI computing, Canghai for video processing, and Xuanling for high-performance networks.
Among them, Zixiao, which positions AI reasoning, supports image and video processing, natural language processing, search recommendations, etc. It claims that its performance is 100% higher than similar solutions in the industry. Positioned in the vast sea of video transcoding, the hardware encoder has won first place in world competitions many times, claiming a compression rate that is more than 30% higher than the industry. Xuanling, which is positioned as a smart network card, accelerates the performance of cloud hosts and improves the performance by 4 times compared with industry products.
There is no need to say more about Huawei. Kirin chips are restricted and revenue in 2021 will be more than 200 billion lower than in 2020. However, in the face of Western technology suppression, Huawei becomes more and more courageous as it fights. Ren Zhengfei still chose to invest 20% of total revenue, or 124 billion yuan, into technology research and development, turning pressure into motivation.
Recently, the foreign research institution "CAPITAL ON TAP" announced the ranking of global patent applications in 2021. Huawei surpassed Samsung and BOE BOE, ranking first with 9739 patents.
At the end of last year, OPPO officially released its first self-developed chip: Mariana MariciliconX. The chip has undergone three years of research and development and is built using TSMC’s 6nm manufacturing process. This is a big step forward for OPPO in research and development.
Xiaomi , The first thing Lei Jun did at the beginning of 2022 was to increase investment in scientific research, announcing that Xiaomi planned to double its R&D investment from 50 billion to 100 billion in five years.
Only by not being controlled by others can we achieve the best development.
