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Under the combined influence of multiple factors such as the new crown epidemic, global chip shortage, and slowdown in demand for mobile phone consumer electronics, the global chip semiconductor industry is facing a double fire.
Titan MediaApp July 1 news, market research firm Omdia recently released a data pointing out that since the revenue increased significantly for five consecutive quarters since Q1 2021, this year (2022) Q1, the global semiconductor market revenue dropped from US$159.35 billion in Q4 2021 to US$159.3 billion, a month-on-month decrease of 0.03%. For the first time, there were signs of slowing quarterly revenue.
At present, chip giants such as Qualcomm , Intel , etc. have begun to "cut orders". According to Tianfeng International analyst , Ming-Chi Kuo, , Qualcomm has cut orders of about 10-15% of the Snapdragon 8 series, and is expected to reduce the price of two flagship mobile chips by 30-40% by the end of the year to clear inventory. Intel CFO Dave Zinsner has said that PC chip revenue is facing a crisis of decline.
At the same time, the automotive industry is still facing a chip shortage dilemma. In late June, Zeng Qinghong, chairman of GAC Group , said in a speech that in the first half of 2022, due to chip shortage and the epidemic, GAC reduced production by 160,000 vehicles, with a loss of about 20 billion yuan in output value. He revealed that GAC faced a chip shortage of up to 33,000 in the second quarter. He Hui, chief analyst of
Omdia semiconductors, said in an exclusive interview with Titanium Media App that the entire semiconductor industry has entered a downward cycle. Consumer electronic chip prices have fallen and demand has slowed down, but the automotive, HPC and other fields are still facing the dilemma of chip shortage. The main reason behind this is that the cycle of replacing new phones has become longer, and the global economy of and consumption power have changed after the epidemic, and the desire for consumption of electronic products has decreased.
However, He Hui believes that this does not mean that demand for some chips has slowed down, and the semiconductor industry will decline in the future. Semiconductors are still an industry worthy of being optimistic in the long term.
"It is not because the mobile phone consumer market fell in the first half of the year, but it can be bought back in the second half of the year (auto chips). Because the overlap between the production lines of automotive chips and consumer electronics does not overlap." He Hui told Titanium Media App that with the explosion of new energy vehicles, , data centers and other fields, some chips may still face shortages in 2023. The price of consumer electronic chips in
plummeted, but the supply and demand of car chips in
The first to adjust the chip prices were consumer electronics fields such as graphics cards and mobile phones.
With the plunge of Bitcoin and the "mining wave" receding, the "air card" that has been unavailable in the past, and the graphics card priced over 10,000 yuan began at the beginning of the year and finally ushered in a sharp drop in price.
market news shows that graphics cards have started to fall slowly as early as November last year. Among them, Nvidia GTX1660s fell by about 400 yuan in three months from November last year to January this year, and then continued to fall sharply. A dealer said, "At the fastest time, it fell by 100 yuan a day, and it fell for 3-4 consecutive days." In addition, the price of the Australian RTX3080 fell by 35% a day. The RTX3090 graphics card in the German market was almost cut to 1,999 euros from 3,199 euros in May last year.
Recently, a friend of mine found in the Shenzhen Huaqiangbei market that the demand for graphics cards, mobile and IoT chips has shown signs of slowing down. "Demand is not good, worse than last year's market."
Since 2022, due to the headwind of macroeconomic , as well as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, local epidemics and other factors, the demand for the consumer electronics market has changed dramatically: high inventory, low demand, price plummeting, and increasing the "order-cutting storm", which has become an industry trend. In terms of inventory of
, according to the report of the Science and Technology News, laptop brand Asus and Acer are facing "high inventory, low demand". The financial report mentioned that it has up to 154 and 80 days of inventory, and the slowdown in consumer terminal demand is affecting the industrial chain.
price and cut unilateral price. Due to the reduction of orders and demand in the supply chain, the market price of some consumer-grade analog chips in Texas Instruments in March is still around 100 yuan, but now it can be bought at 20 yuan, a drop of up to 80%; Samsung , Xiaomi and other major Chinese Android phones have cut about 100 million orders since the end of March, and Samsung has also lowered its mobile phone shipment target of about 10% to 275 million units in 2022.
, especially the mobile phone market demand, is accelerating and slowing down. Market research firm Counterpoint predicts that global smartphone market shipments will decline by 3% year-on-year in 2022; while Gartner released the latest report on the 30th, global PC and smartphone shipments will shrink this year, and it is predicted that China's smartphone shipments will decrease by 18% compared with last year in 2022.
He Hui told Titanium Media App that the fundamental reason for the slowdown in consumer electronics is, in addition to the slowdown in demand for the epidemic, the overall replacement cycle of mobile phones has become longer, and economic uncertainty after the epidemic has led to a decrease in consumer electronics desire. "Not only China, I think there are such problems all over the world."
Regarding the topic of TSMC's price increase, He Hui believes that there are two reasons: First, it is understandable that under the overall environment of global inflation, it is understandable that 5% rises every year; second, TSMC may need to use this price increase to increase customer concentration and form a process of screening customers.
financial report shows that in Q1 2022, TSMC's smartphone and high-performance computing fields accounted for 40% and 41% of net revenue respectively, while the Internet of Things, automobiles, DCE and others accounted for 8%, 5%, 3% and 3% respectively.
, CEO of TSMC, said at the annual shareholders' meeting in early June, "The company will continue to observe the high inventory levels of customers, and the annual production capacity is becoming tight. The demand for some sub-industry such as PCs, tablets and smartphones is weakening, but demand in some areas is gradually strengthening."
is slowing down compared to mobile chips, but automotive chips are still in a chip shortage dilemma.
At the 2022 China Nansha International Integrated Circuit Industry Forum held on June 25, Chen Yudong, president of the core automotive parts manufacturer " Bosch China ", said that at present, its chip products can only meet the average demand of automobile manufacturers by 31%, and it is expected that the supply rate can increase to 50% to 60% in the second half of the year, but "chip shortage" will still be the theme.
Chen Yudong said that although automotive-grade chips account for a small proportion in the overall chip market, their impact on output value amplification coefficient is tens of thousands of times. For example, a chip worth more than ten yuan will affect the sales of a car priced at 100,000 to 200,000 yuan.
He took a Bosch ESP (body electronic stability system) product as an example, saying that although the product consists of only 6 chips from four suppliers, one of the chips failed to keep up, resulting in the car being discontinued. "In the first half of this year, I estimate that the total production capacity of 1 million vehicles of major enterprises (domestic) enterprises will be affected. After estimates, the output value of 100 billion will be gone." He admitted.
He Hui told Titanium Media App that in addition to Nvidia or Qualcomm related to computing power, other automotive chips are mainly cooperated with foreign IDM manufacturers such as Renesas, Toshiba Memory, STMicroelectronics , Infineon , and NXP. The mature process technology automotive chips are still facing a shortage.
"In fact, everyone has always said that the lack of chips in cars is because they earned in consumption type . In fact, this is a not-so-rigorous statement, especially in the upstream semiconductor manufacturing link, the production lines of automotive use do not overlap with consumer products. When the new crown epidemic and other factors were factors, car manufacturers closed their production capacity and demand for procurement supply chains fell. However, now, in the post-epidemic recovery, the industrialization and intelligence of new energy vehicles are still in an explosive growth period. The market is growing, and automotive semiconductor manufacturers cannot expand their supply." He Hui said that the expansion of production of automotive chips cannot be as fast as consumer electronic chips, especially it has a specialized production process, and the shortage will continue.
General Manager of GAC Capital Yuan Feng said that the shortage of automotive chips will continue until 2024.
's self-sufficiency rate is less than 5%, and the supply of domestic chips needs to be enhanced
market research agency IC Insights shows that in 2021, China's auto chip self-sufficiency rate is still less than 5%.
Zeng Qinghong said that the negative effects of chip shortage and other problems on the sustainable development of China's automobile industry are becoming increasingly prominent, and efforts should be made to increase the domestic production of automotive-grade chips in China. He believes that China's high reliance on foreign chip supply has become a potential hidden danger that affects the healthy development of the automobile industry.
Due to chip supply issues, China's automobile production fell by 1 million in the first six months of 2022.
Car companies and related industrial chains are jointly solving the dilemma of chip shortage. For example, GAC Capital has invested in Guangdong Semiconductor, a local wafer foundry company located in Guangzhou, to develop analog chips for future models on 12-inch wafers. According to Yuan Feng, the two sides have formed a team of 40-50 people for this purpose.
htmlOn June 30, Guangdong Xin Semiconductor announced that it had completed a new round of financing of 4.5 billion yuan. The Guangdong semiconductor and integrated circuit industry investment fund , managed by GAC Capital, a subsidiary of GAC Group and Yuecai Holdings , led by Investment Fund of GAC Group. Other investors include Industrial Capital , a subsidiary of SAIC and BAIC, as well as Yuexiu Industrial Fund, Yingke Capital, Shengyu Industrial Control Fund , Huadeng International, GF Securities , Science City Group, Lanpu Venture Capital, etc.As one of China's pillar industries, its sustainable development is seriously affected by the tight supply of mainstream mature process chips, especially the problem of tight supply of mainstream mature process chips. After experiencing the pain of chip shortage, China's automobile industry has strengthened its chain and accelerated its layout in the chip field.
However, in the short term, domestic automotive chips cannot really "replace" upstream and downstream. Vehicle manufacturers will still rely on top automotive chip companies such as STMicroelectronics, Infineon, Renesas to assemble Bosch to supply them to vehicle manufacturers. After all, the latter technology is more mature, and the industry threshold is not so easy to be "replaced".
Of course, as domestic large-scale computing power automotive-specific chips enter the year of mass production, the degree of binding between some domestic auto companies and chip companies has begun to deepen, and the struggle with foreign veteran chip manufacturers has gradually begun.
"Any electronic products, whether it is a mobile phone or a car, it cannot be shipped without a chip." He Hui said,
Domestic semiconductors have entered a capital winter?
html At the event on June 25, Liu Dan, Guangdong-Macao Semiconductor Industry Fund and Executive Affairs Partner, said that in the global semiconductor downward cycle, the domestic semiconductor industry has entered a capital winter. Xiong Quan, partner of Wu Yuefeng Capital, said bluntly, "I agree with the capital winter view. It is difficult for many domestic chip startups to find investments."However, He Hui does not fully agree with this statement.
"I think consumer electronics has indeed entered a trough, and it may need something new. Overall, the fields including automotive chips, HPC chips, etc. are basically from the peak to the platform period. They are in a growth trend, not recession and the so-called 'capital winter'." He Hui told Titanium Media App.
In fact, since 2015, the country has actively supported the semiconductor industry. This industry is a bit too hot, especially the capital is relatively sensitive, and it has started by "spending money". But the core is that China's semiconductor industry's technology and talent reserves are still very weak, and there are not so many resources in China to support it. Semiconductor investment and financing are getting cold, but the demand is just that, and the story is not that easy to tell. Data obtained by
Titanium Media App from Qichacha shows that from 2011 to the present, a total of 3,971 investment and financing incidents have occurred in China's chip semiconductor track, with a total disclosed financing amount exceeding one trillion yuan. Among them, there were 492 investment and financing events in 2021, with the total disclosed financing amount exceeding 387.6 billion yuan, far exceeding the 109.769 billion yuan in the whole year of 2020. In the first three months of 2022, there were 310 financing events, 4.6 times that of the same period in 2021. The total amount of disclosed financing exceeded 35 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of about 3%.
Although periodic recession is inevitable. But we should need to look at things from a different perspective. For more than half a century, semiconductors have been the core of technological innovation.
TSMC Chairman Liu Deyin recently pointed out in Fortune magazine that the rise of 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), AR/VR and intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) is opening the "golden age of the semiconductor industry."
"The next few decades will be the golden age of the semiconductor industry. In the past 50 years, the development of semiconductor technology has been like walking in a tunnel," Liu wrote. "It is approaching the exit of the tunnel. There are more possibilities outside the tunnel. Innovation from materials to architecture will make new paths possible... We are no longer restricted by tunnels, and have unlimited innovation space."
Regarding future investment directions, Xiao Chunan, executive director of Huaxing Securities Investment Bank, once mentioned that fields including automotive electronics, semiconductor manufacturing, chip design tool EDA, compound semiconductors, etc. deserve continued attention.
"The emerging segmented industries in the semiconductor field are currently in the bud and have not yet developed on a large scale. "He Hui told Titanium Media App.
He Hui emphasized that whether it is automotive or industrial chips, it has been used abroad for many years, and the threshold for substitution is high. In the long run, domestic semiconductors will still show a catching up momentum.
At present, the chip industry is in a "ice and fire" pattern and will continue for a long time.
(This article was first released on Titanium Media App, author | Lin Zhijia)
