At the end of September, an article was widely circulated on the Internet, titled "After losing Huawei ", TSMC was cut off by Apple . The author listed technology and market data seriously, which was true, and while adding the drama, he also added the three global technology giants into the palace crew. Their grudges, love, hate, and love, half-covered and half-covered, for netizens to watch and fantasize. It was so satisfying, and ridiculed TSMC for not being polite. It was just right for this to happen.
However, although the article is good, some places need to be added. For example, the article mentioned that TSMC lost Huawei's orders and was extremely regretful. What it lost was not only an important income, but also caused TSMC to lose its bargaining power. This is true, but TSMC has not only lost its bargaining power, but even the right to protect its life is in danger. How can I see
? Let's see what's going on recently.
butterfly effect of the US chip bill
In early August, U.S. President Biden signed a bipartisan bill totaling $280 billion, which will provide $52.7 billion in subsidies and tax credits for companies that make chips in the United States, and also spend $200 billion on new manufacturing plans and scientific research, especially in artificial intelligence , robotics, quantum computing and other technology fields.
As soon as this wind kicked off, it hit Japan and European countries. has launched high subsidies to support operators to produce locally.
Two months later, in early October, the US Department of Commerce issued regulations that will completely block China from obtaining any advanced chips, cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing equipment, design software and talents. This is the most violent ban on semiconductor technology sales so far, aiming to pinch the neck of China's semiconductor industry, claiming to push China's AI industry back to Stone Age .
The global semiconductor industry chain is up, middle, down, left or right, and moves when you hear the news, with activeness and passiveness.
One of Apple's suppliers is Chinese state-owned Yangtze Storage . Because of the same specifications, its DRAM is about 20% cheaper than other suppliers. Now that the ban is released, Yangtze Storage cannot get American equipment and naturally cannot produce DRAM, so Apple will have to find another supplier.
According to the US online media The Information, quoted people familiar with the matter on October 18, due to sluggish demand, Apple will cut production less than two weeks after the iPhone 14 Plus debut, and is reevaluating the market demand for new models. The report pointed out that Apple has notified at least one Chinese manufacturer to immediately stop producing iPhone 14 Plus components, and also informed two other downstream suppliers that it is expected to cut 70% and 90% of the order output.
But Apple President Cook (Tim Cook ) said earlier in July that the company has not seen in internal data that the adverse factors of macroeconomic are affecting its iPhone sales.
Apple (Apple) quarterly report, revenue for the fourth quarter of the fiscal year ended September 24 was US$90.1 billion, an increase of 8.14% year-on-year, setting a record for the highest revenue in the fiscal year; the iPhone business earned US$42.6 billion in the last quarter, an increase of more than 9.6% year-on-year, but it was not as expected by the market.
On the other hand, Bloomberg (Bloomberg) also quoted insiders as saying that TSMC (TSMC) has suspended the production of advanced chips for Chinese startup Biren Technology to comply with the US chip laws. Biren is known as China's most promising semiconductor design company. The person familiar with the matter revealed that the decision is related to the rumored that Biren products performed better than the A100 chip of Huida (Nvidia Corp). Huida's chip is no longer available in the Chinese market.
In recent years, the United States has been moving further and further on curbing the rise of China's technological rise, gradually becoming more and more spicy. The Trump method was initially high tariffs, and bilateralism could still bargain, but the Biden administration has been one-size-fits-all, escalating from the trade war to the technology war, economic war , and with the support of both parties in Congress, it became a bill. As a result, not only was the attempt to hit the Chinese industry hard, but it also swept many brands around the world, directly forcing technology companies that could not get the franchise exemption to give up the Chinese market, and reshaping the global industrial chain due to the US's tyranny. It must be done, do it immediately, do it without any compromise, even if the price is heavy. Under such circumstances, China responded actively without shrinking. According to the South China Morning Post, after the United States implemented a new round of bans, in addition to the central government's development policies and regulations, local governments also played the role of financial owners. For example, Shenzhen, the southern science and technology center that is the most hard-working in the development of the technology industry, is traditionally the electronics and software industries, and is also catching up with Shanghai and strengthening the role of semiconductor supply chain. Shenzhen has promised to provide up to RMB 10 million a year to pay local chip design companies the necessary IP fees to purchase to promote semiconductor research and development. Cash rewards of up to RMB 30 million were also issued to attract top semiconductor companies to settle in.
wafer foundry leader TSMC is embarrassing situation
Global supply chain is facing challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation , consumer market recession, and geopolitical risks. Washington wants to take control of semiconductor power, trying to cut off China's key advanced semiconductor supply sources while getting rid of relying on Taiwan's chip supply. This trend will not stop, but will only intensify. TSMC , known as the "Island Protection Mountain", is far ahead of the world in the fields of artificial intelligence, high-speed computing and the Internet of Things, and plays an important role in the industrial chain, but in this way, is sandwiched in the middle, it will inevitably affect its dominant position in chip manufacturing.
This is not a sensation. At the end of October, TSMC's ADR trend was weak, at least due to the insult of the media and the industry. The UK Financial Times (FT) reported that due to the bottleneck of the new chip process and the large subsidies from various governments to strengthen local production, such as Intel and Samsung Electronics , TSMC may find it difficult to maintain its technologically leading advantage.
Goldman Sachs Securities believes that TSMC's stock price has been at the historical low end of ten years of trading, and P/E ratio is close to the financial tsunami period, but it may still face many risks, investors may wait and see or leave.
TSMC's competitor Intel (Intel) CEO Kissinger said more directly. He said at an online technology forum held by the Wall Street Journal : "Taiwan plays such a critical role in the technology supply chain, but it is in jealousy. The world needs a geobalanced and resilient supply chain."
There was a lot of ridicule and worry outside, and even TSMC people couldn't hide their nervousness. Zhang Zhongmou, the founder of TSMC, who is 90 years old, said in an interview with the American CBS 2 program "60 Minutes" that if extreme situations occur, TSMC will be destroyed and everything will be destroyed.
This is what I said at the beginning that TSMC's right to protect his life is in the changing circumstances, and he has no choice but to do anything.
It is a success and a failure. It is a semiconductor. It is a semiconductor. At this point, I wonder if you think the amount of information is huge. What you hear is not pure commercial or technological stories, but more like the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, when all parties were competing for the Central Plains and fighting each other.
This is the case. We might as well refer to the practices of Nihon Keizai News editor Ota Yasuhiko to sort out the context of the global semiconductor industry chain.
Ota reported that the semiconductor industry has been in excess of 35 years. At the end of last year, it published the book "Semiconductor Geopolitics". The book starts from a geopolitical perspective, analyzes the international political and economic structure with the semiconductor industry as the core, and analyzes the offensive and defensive situation of semiconductor key actors such as the United States, China (including Taiwan), EU , the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Japan in this future competition.
Please first outline a world map in your mind and mark the distribution locations of important digital industry companies in the world.
First of all, Silicon Valley in California, the United States, Google, Apple, Facebook , Intel, etc. set up their headquarters here, and many factory-less semiconductor companies are also gathered here. Also in Washington, D.C., on the northern part of the West Coast, there are the headquarters of Amazon and Microsoft .
Asia, China's Huawei, Tencent and other digital companies gather in Shenzhen, Guangdong. Going slightly north along the coast from Shenzhen, it is the Alibaba Group Corporation in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Most Chinese companies related to semiconductors have their bases in southeastern coastal provinces such as Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang.
As for Taiwan, wafer foundries led by TSMC, as well as manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, material factories, etc. for the post-stage process, are concentrated in Hsinchu in the west.
South Korea has Samsung Electronics, the world's second largest semiconductor manufacturer, second only to Intel, and SK Hynix Semiconductor, the world's third largest. Although Japan declined between 1980 and 1990, it still had a place in the manufacturing of memory.
connects the positions of these companies into lines, and the outline of the semiconductor supply chain for trade projects will roughly emerge. Each stronghold surrounds the Pacific coast, and the trans-Pacific region is the stage for the global semiconductor industry.
Oda Yahiko reminds in the book that behind the supply chain of Pacific Rim commodity trade, the global battle for technological hegemony has begun. We should not only pay attention to our actual geographical location, but also the strategies of the country and enterprises in virtual cyberspace. Semiconductors are not only tradable commodities, but also an invisible crystallization of technology, professional knowledge and intellectual property rights. They are also strategic materials that influence the national security guarantee of . They can be called the oil of the 21st century. Whether it is advanced F35 fighter jets, military drone , extreme sound missiles, or even robots equipped with AI chips in the future, they all need high-end semiconductor chip .
For many years, the semiconductor industry has been a model of global supply chain integration. The high R&D costs and intensive capital expenditure have prompted different countries and regions to specialize in different steps of the chip manufacturing process. No country and region can complete it alone, and everyone depends heavily on each other.
This is the current situation of the global semiconductor supply chain
The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have made a chart to highlight the proportion of influence in the chip supply chain in various regions.
In the upstream part of the semiconductor industry, in terms of chip design software alone, US companies account for as high as 74% of the global market, while mainland China only accounts for 3%. As for the IC design part, US companies account for 67%, while mainland China only accounts for 5%. In this field, the United States' Huida (Nvidia), Ultramicro (AMD), Intel, Qualcomm are all leaders, while the mainland's IC design leaders are Huawei's HiSilicon Semiconductor and Shanghai Weil Semiconductor.
is in the middle of the semiconductor industry, that is, wafer manufacturing. TSMC's output value accounts for more than 50% of the global wafer foundry market share, leading the way, while Taiwan's advanced process production capacity accounts for 61% of the world's global share.
As for the downstream of the semiconductor industry, chip package and testing, the United States and mainland China account for a small proportion of the world, while Taiwan has been NO.1 for many years.
cannot be ignored here Aismore (ASML). Yes, it is the famous lithography machine manufacturer in Netherlands .It is the only company in the world that is capable of producing extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine. It is an indispensable device in advanced processes such as logic ICs and memory. In order to ensure the supply of , major companies such as Intel, TSMC and , Samsung have all bought shares of Aismore, both as customers and shareholders, and are more guaranteed to pick up the goods.
Esmore is too special. It is located in Europe, but its major shareholder is American capital. If there are any problems, the production of advanced semiconductors in the world will be suspended, which will be everyone's nightmare.
As Oda Yahiko pointed out in Semiconductor Geopolitics, the United States currently relies on Taiwan and South Korea wafer foundries and is queuing up to purchase Esmore's equipment. If American companies such as Intel and Grocephonde officially participate in the competition for microprocessors, they must also join the ranks of waiting for Esmore equipment to be supplied. As long as Esmore is still a Dutch enterprise, Europe still holds dominance in the global semiconductor manufacturing industry. Therefore, even if they are both "Western camp", Europe does not need to obey the United States.
It can be seen from this that the situation in the past where the global semiconductor industry chain was in business and the winner took all, either without adjustment, once it was adjusted, it would be very likely to be turned upside down.
chip game is even more complicated than the chip itself
behind technology, and geopolitics behind the semiconductor industry has always been. In general, in the commercial arena, there is no eternal friendly force, no eternal enemy, only interests, so is based on technology and price. But when the invisible power behind the economy is in the process, it is as strong as Apple, TSMC, Huawei, and Aismore, and they can only be in the world and cannot help themselves. If you are obsessed with business, you will appear naive. When making decisions, you will have to become increasingly painful and complex, which has surpassed the original business essence.
Go back to the online article mentioned at the beginning. Is it better to choose Huawei and give up Apple when TSMC selected a side station a few years ago? ——This is a world-class mixed drama, with the protagonist and supporting role playing supporting roles, running around in front of the stage, and exciting scenes one after another. In the end, they may be just a pawn of the players behind the scenes.
This game is even a hundred times more complicated than the structure of the 2nm chip.
Sometimes it is really hard to tell whether it is a person who plays a chip or a chip that plays a human being. It is quite interesting in Zhuangzi in the theory of things. I don’t know whether Zhuang Zhou dreams of a butterfly or a butterfly dreams of Zhuang Zhou.
Even if human society is regarded as a big machine, with the most cutting-edge AI chips inserted into it and can operate at a high speed, it cannot calculate the exact future of mankind. As the saying goes, human calculations are not as good as computer calculations, computer calculations are not as good as God's calculations. Many times, many things are really uncontrollable.
Reference:
【1】 After losing Huawei, TSMC was cut by Apple. Technology push daily,
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MjM5NzAwNzMyMA==&mid=2660064273&idx=1&sn=712f0deed9c9f1bfa334c9515fa83e40&chksm=bd9966a68aeeefb0c0a72f8d65858350e71157a87bd1d6eed2d0ebe0a99a00297141f495e72d&token=335831211&lang=zh_CN#rd
【2】Biden signs $280 billion chip and scientific research bill, Wall Street Journal Chinese website,
https://cn.wsj.com/articles/%E6%8B%9C%E7%99%BB%E7%B0%BD%E7%BD%B22-800%E5%84%84%E7%BE%8E%E5%85%83%E6%99%B6%E7%89%87%E8%88%87%E7%A7%91%E7%A0%94%E6%B3%95%E6%A1%88-121660091107
【3】TSMC Suspends Work for Chinese Chip Startup Amid US Curbs, Bloomberg,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-22/tsmc-said-to-suspend-work-for-chinese-chip-startup-amid-us-curbs?leadSource=uverify%20wall
【4】Apple (Apple) 2022.10 quarterly report,
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/10/apple-reports-fourth-quarter-results/
【5】Apple Cuts iPhone 14 Plus Production Less Than Two Weeks After Debut, The Information,
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-cuts-iphone-14-plus-production-less-than-two-weeks-after-debut
【6】Tech war: Chinese local governments ramp up chip industry support as US piles on export restrictions, South China Morning Post,
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3196406/tech-war-local-governments-china-ramp-support-chip-industry-development-us-piles-export-restrictions
【7】TSMC: the Taiwanese chipmaker caught up in the tech cold war, Financial Times,
https://www.ft.com/content/bae9756a-3bce-4595-b6c9-8082fd735aa0
【8】Chinese version of "Semiconductor Geopolitics", 2022/08/31, written by Oda Taihiko, translated by Zhuo Huijuan, published by Savage Culture
Editor: Yaolu
