chips goes without saying, but due to various reasons, it has always been mainly dependent on imports. However, changes in chip rules in the past two years, especially the restrictions on Huawei chip foundry, make us understand that we must work hard to achieve domestic breakthroughs.
naturally faces many problems, such as restrictions on equipment, materials and software such as lithography machine and EDA. However, the most important thing is chip talent, which is the key. In recent news, and SMIC’s new actions have been reported, hitting the key point.
How important are chip talents?
Talents are crucial to the development of the technology industry, and the high-tech industry of chips is no exception. Especially at this critical moment when the world is short of chips, many places are investing in the chip industry, and chip talents are even more scarce. Human phenomenon becomes more frequent.
It can be seen from the substantial investment increases by chip giants that the importance of chip talents has become increasingly prominent. TSMC routinely adjusts capital in April every year, but this year's amplitude and will be higher than in previous years, reaching 8%, and the proportion of TSMC's Shanghai factory is even higher.
, , and MediaTek are even more powerful. Last year, the average salary of employees was more than one million yuan, an increase of about 50% over the previous year.
The purpose of these large chip manufacturers' salary increases is of course to retain technical talents in this way. But even so, their growth rate is not as high as that of the mainland. There is news that in mainland China, wages have been raised very high in order to poach people.
The main reason is that the mainland has launched a chip boom in the past two years, a lot of capital has begun to be invested, and all aspects of the industry chain have begun to accelerate development. It can be seen from the number of new chip companies that chip design companies alone increased by 592 last year.
However, chip talents are seriously unable to keep up. This year, the chip talent gap will reach 250,000, and there will be a shortage of 300,000 in 2025.
The demand for chip talents is increasing rapidly, and the gap in chip talents is huge. This naturally leads to frequent competition for talents in the chip industry. Therefore, major chip manufacturers such as TSMC and MediaTek have adopted capital allocation to retain talents.
From the capital adjustment situation of TSMC and MediaTek, we can find that the capital adjustment rate of chip manufacturing companies is not comparable to that of chip design companies. This is not an exception, but a common phenomenon. In fact, manufacturing wages have always been relatively low. Although the
wafer foundry is a high-end manufacturing industry, it is still a manufacturing industry, and the overall salary level is not as good as that of chip design.
SMIC’s new move comes
This has led to a very serious brain drain in chip manufacturing plants. Previously, media reported that more than 3,000 chip experts have flowed from Taiwan, China to the mainland in the past two years. Of course, a lot of this comes from TSMC, where the turnover rate is said to be as high as 15.7%.
The phenomenon of brain drain has a great impact, because it is very difficult to train chip talents, especially important technical talents. After they leave, they will affect the progress of technology research and development, and more importantly, they will accelerate the technological development of competitors.
Of course, not only TSMC, but SMIC also faces this problem, and the turnover rate of technical talents is also quite high.
Talent flow is also a normal phenomenon among large enterprises. It is also a personal choice to go wherever the salary is high, the treatment is good, and the development prospects are good. But this will test the management of the company to see whether it can take measures to retain technical talents.
SMIC has been working hard for this and decided to provide stock incentives to key personnel and technical personnel every year. In July last year, 67.5352 million shares were granted to 3,944 employees, accounting for 22.73% of the total employees. Based on the price of 20 yuan per share at that time,
would need a total of 2.148 billion yuan, which accounted for nearly half of SMIC’s net profit last year.
At that time, they also focused on increasing Liang Mengsong's salary by as much as 12 times, and also rewarded him with a property worth about 20 million yuan. It can be said that in order to retain this technology giant, SMIC has paid a lot.
However, Liang Mengsong’s contribution is actually not that much, but Liang Mengsong doesn’t care. He once donated all his income from SMIC to a domestic education foundation. He also said that it was not for the benefit of high-ranking officials, but only wanted to do his best for mainland chips. Partial force.
Recently, news came out that SMIC announced a new move and announced that it would award 8.1152 million shares to 1,175 employees.
It is worth mentioning that this time SMIC’s stock awards included only 800,000 shares for management personnel, and the remaining 90% were awarded to key technical and business personnel. It can be seen that SMIC attaches great importance to technical talents, which is also hitting the key point.
For chip talents, we must not only cultivate but also retain them. Only by reducing brain drain can we ensure continued rapid progress!
