The latest progress! What happened to the cross-border core-building of 34 local giants?

20 18 is a special year. In March, the Sino-US trade war officially kicked off, and the Trump administration announced that it would impose tariffs on US$ 50 billion of China goods and impose investment restrictions. In April, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that the U.S. government would ban ZTE from purchasing sensitive products from American enterprises in the next seven years, which was the famous "ZTE incident". Behind the trade war and ZTE incident, the fragility of domestic supply chain is exposed, and the importance of speeding up the solution of the "stuck neck" problem is highlighted, especially in the field of semiconductor core technology.

Since the 20 18 trade war and the "ZTE incident", domestic enterprises have set off a new round of vigorous domestic substitution wave in the semiconductor field. Under the continuous fermentation of the problem of "lack of core" in the past two years, the camp of "making core" has been further expanded, and manufacturers in smart phones, automobiles, Internet, home appliances, ODM, real estate, distributors and other industries have entered the semiconductor industry across the border.

By 2022, four years have passed. Are the players who did cross-border nuclear work together now? Let's take a look.

Chip is the core competitiveness of mobile phone manufacturers. It is not difficult to find that the necessary condition for people who can climb to the top of the tower is to have their own self-developed chips, such as Apple and Huawei. Self-developed chips have become a necessary option for domestic manufacturers to further develop and create exclusive differentiation through self-research.

In order to create a unique differentiated user experience, Xiaomi and vivo have successively launched self-developed image ISP chips 2855438+0 and vivo V 1 according to their own needs, and OPPO is the trump card, directly launching the image-specific NPU chip Mariana X. Compared with ISP, NPU chips not only have stronger performance, but also have stronger deep learning ability.

However, at present, the chips mass-produced by the three domestic giants OVM are still not highly integrated with them.

Compared with SoC chips, even being ridiculed, except Huawei, other domestic mobile phones are extravagant hopes and marketing gimmicks, but what is important is that the mobile phone giant has taken the first step. It is believed that there will be more products equipped with domestic self-developed core technologies in the future.

Stimulated by the insufficient supply of chips since the second half of 2020, there was an obvious shortage of automobile chips in the first half of last year, and even some automobile manufacturers could not go offline because of the shortage of chips.

Starting from 20021,China automobile enterprises began to invest vertically in the chip industry on a large scale, and laid out their own automobile chip supply chain. Among them, domestic veteran car companies including BAIC, SAIC, Dongfeng, Geely, etc. are actively investing in chip companies, and their product types cover silicon carbide power devices, autonomous driving chips, intelligent cockpit chips and other fields.

In terms of technology, even though automobile chips such as BYD, Zero Run Automobile and Wuling Automobile have come out, there is still a big gap with top manufacturers in technology.

Taking the self-developed intelligent driver chip as an example, Lingxin 0 1 adopts a manufacturing process of 28nm, with a power consumption of 4W and a computing power of 8.4TOPS, which is not as good as the manufacturing process of 16nm, a computing power of 5Tops and a power consumption of 2.4W adopted by Horizon Journey 3 in China for the time being. It is far from international manufacturers. NVIDIA and other international manufacturers have been developing automobile chips with advanced 5nm and 7nm processes, and some products have been mass-produced or loaded.

Under the background of electronization, electrification and intelligence, the demand for chips by vehicle manufacturers is more diversified, and a single chain cooperation model can no longer meet the demand. Vehicle manufacturers began to try to develop products directly with chip manufacturers across component suppliers, and the network model began to rise. In the future, in the field of intelligence, the cooperation mode of automobile manufacturers entering the upstream supply chain through capital operation will become the norm.

It can be seen that the layout of the chip field through self-developed AI chips is the mainstream way for Internet companies to enter the chip market. For different Internet companies, due to different ecosystems, the requirements for chip performance are also different. In this case, customized AI chips may make them better play their ecological value. As far as the current market situation is concerned, the market has not given Internet companies enough choices. In this case, self-developed AI chips have become a development path.

According to the survey data of ABI research, the global market size of cloud AI chips will reach 654.38+000 billion USD in 2024, and most of the market share is occupied by NVIDIA. On the one hand, the huge market scale of the chip market has attracted the attention of Internet vendors. In addition, the current "lack of core tide" and "stuck neck" threats have also forced Internet vendors to build cores. On the other hand, the chip industry chain is becoming more and more mature, and the core-making cost is reduced. The deep development of cloud computing and other services is also inseparable from the blessing of chips.

Throughout the Internet, celebrities with surnames are either "making nuclear weapons" or "making nuclear weapons".

In fact, after 2000, home appliance enterprises represented by Haier, Midea, Konka, TCL, Hisense, Changhong and Skyworth responded to the call and embarked on the road of home appliance chip research and development. Gree and Midea are mainly MCU, Hisense is a high-end TV quality chip, SoC and AI chip, TCL is a display and touch chip, and a set-top box smart chip. Changhong's representative chip is audio processing SOC, Haier is an Internet of Things chip, Skyworth is an AI image quality chip, and Konka is.

Starting so early, however, 20 years later, compared with Huawei, China's seven home appliance giants "made cores" a bit out of control.

As early as 20 17 shareholders' meeting, Gree Dong Mingzhu said, "Gree wants to build chips, and even if it invests 50 billion yuan in the future, Gree will develop successful chips!" It has been five years since the 20 17 shareholders' meeting. Gree announced that its self-developed domestic chip-32-bit MCU micro-control unit chip has entered the mass production stage and has been put into use. At present, the annual output is as high as100000.

The problem is, if Gree really spent 50 billion yuan and spent several years designing only one MCU chip, it really means that anti-aircraft guns killed mosquitoes. This is also the epitome of cross-border core-building of home appliance enterprises.

Due to the intensified competition in the ODM industry of mobile phones in recent years, Matthew effect is outstanding. The stronger the strong, the smaller the industry development space, and the greater the influence of the mobile phone market. In this case, even leading enterprises such as Foxconn and Wen Tai Science and Technology dare not relax easily, and are actively looking for a way out.

20 15, Wen Tai science and technology became the first ODM (original design manufacturer) listed company in the A-share market through Yin Zhong "curve listing". However, the mobile ODM industry has a low threshold and a low gross profit margin. After the successful listing, Wen Tai Science and Technology turned its attention to the semiconductor industry. After the acquisition of Anshi Semiconductor, Wen Tai Technology has completed the transformation from a mobile phone foundry to a semiconductor company, with a market value exceeding 100 billion, which is a classic of cross-border core-building for domestic enterprises.

Real estate developers represented by Jinmao and Evergrande, their "cross-border semiconductor" is nothing more than a new attempt to find profit growth points, and to create a model of "ecological park+real estate", which may take the operation of industrial parks as the main purpose and play an auxiliary role in the development of semiconductor industry, rather than actually becoming semiconductors and developing chips. Accurately speaking, it only relies on industry to develop real estate-related business.

Cross-border core-building in real estate is also the only one in several major fields that we have seen so far that we have no ability to produce real chip products. With the thunderstorm of Evergrande and the sharp decline of the real estate industry, the core building of real estate seems to be becoming a distant future.

As we all know, in the field of semiconductor chip distribution, it is usually mainly the upstream chip manufacturers from distribution and agency business, and they will not directly independently develop chips. Chip manufacturers and distributors have a clear division of labor, and distributors will not be involved in the original chip business. However, the case of entering the chip industry from distributors does exist, that is, Weir shares, previously a distributor, officially became the original factory through acquisition and became a leading CIS enterprise in China.

With the development of domestic electronic component distribution industry, the strength of distributors is increasing day by day, and more and more distributors begin to touch the upstream original factory resources through capital operation and other means to enhance their competitive advantage. Even Weill shares have been completely transformed into the original chip factory, and this trend will continue to develop in depth under the background of Sino-US trade disputes and domestic substitution.

It is not difficult to find that apart from the different purposes of real estate developers' "cross-border" entry into the semiconductor field, whether it is home appliance manufacturers using technology to empower products, Internet manufacturers to establish ecology, or foundry manufacturers seeking transformation, they basically want to make achievements in the semiconductor field and contribute to the development of "China Core".

It should be noted that although these manufacturers rely on China's vast market, engaging in semiconductor industry and developing chips are full of infinite opportunities and possibilities, but enterprises must be prepared for a protracted war.

First, be prepared for long-term losses. Shanghai Haier IC Company is a typical case. The company has been in this field for more than ten years, and the loss period is as long as 10 year. It was not until 20 1 1 that the revenue threshold of 100 million yuan was crossed, and the revenue of 20 12 years 1.4 1 100 million yuan.

The second is to prepare for talent reserve and technical attack. The shortage of talents has become a common problem in the integrated circuit industry in recent years, and the speed of talent training is far behind the market demand. Enterprises should have a long-term plan for "cross-border" semiconductor manufacturing, how to acquire talents and rely on talents to achieve technological breakthroughs.

The third is to prepare for long-term high-risk investment. A major feature of the semiconductor industry is long cycle, high risk and wide coverage. As far as a chip is concerned, the time from planning, design to mass production is as short as three to five years and as long as ten years, which is obviously different from other industries.

# Chip # # Semiconductor # # Domestic Substitute # #vivo Chip R&D Center was established, with an annual salary of one million chip experts #