A few days ago, the domestic media reported a news that Oufei Technology, which focuses on the optical and imaging business, is joining the consortium to acquire the shares of Japanese display giant JDI. Because it involves the background of the rise of China's entire panel industry, this news has received wide attention from everyone. Although Oufei Technology announced in the afternoon yesterday that they only had initial contact with JDI, as of the date of the report, the two sides have not reached any agreement and there has been no substantive progress.
In the author's view, through the "cross-border" approach of Oufei Technology, we will look back at the development of local integrated circuit companies in the past year. We can clearly see that domestic semiconductor leaders who have only relied on several products or survived are stepping up their horizontal layout, aiming to enhance their competitiveness and risk resistance, and to meet the upcoming new era.
China's integrated circuit industry status
According to data published by Professor Wei Shaojun in ICCAD 2018 held in Zhuhai earlier, 783 of the 1,698 Chinese companies engaged in integrated circuit design are engaged in the research and development of consumer products; then 307 are engaged in communication related; There are 210 related simulations.
However, from the perspective of revenue, the consumer chip industry with the largest number of integrated circuit design companies only contributed 23.95% of the total revenue, far behind the 104.675 billion yuan of the communications field represented by smart phones. Looking at analog and power, the total number of companies added in these two areas is actually more than that of communication chip companies, but revenue is only 21% of communication chips. Looking at computer chips, although the revenue contributed by companies in this field has surged by 180.18% year-on-year, revenues are far from the field of communication chips.
Distribution of revenue of China's integrated circuit chip design companies (according to product areas)
It can be seen from the above data that nearly half of China's IC industry's revenue is based on the contribution of the chip industry contributed by smart phones. Although Professor Wei Shaojun did not disclose the top ten domestic enterprise names in this year's revenue, from the data he provided, compared with the previous titles, it is certain that Huawei Haisi and Ziguang Zhanrui are the top two. The revenue has exceeded 60 billion. Compared with previous years' lists, it can be seen that half of the top ten companies' revenues are strongly related to mobile phone related chip business (the top ten mobile phone related suppliers are Haisi, Zhan Rui, Hao Wei, Huiding and Gekewei). From here, we can see the strong correlation between China's integrated circuit companies and mobile phone chips.
Professor Wei Shaojun also gave a profound evaluation of the status quo of China's integrated circuit enterprises. According to his statement: "The mainstream design technology of China's IC design industry has not made any significant progress. The overall technology roadmap has not yet been rid of follow-up. The status quo following others has not changed fundamentally, and product innovation needs to be improved. China's enterprises Since the process and EDA tools have progressed, the status quo of product upgrades has not changed. Enterprises that can define their own design processes according to the process and adopt the COT design method are still rare.
Local integrated circuit companies seek development
Although the communication chip is not the whole of the local integrated circuit, it can explain the current situation of China's integrated circuit design enterprises, that is, focusing on several products to make money around the relatively concentrated field. But now that the terminal is ushered in a new wave of change, the encounters of Imagination and Dialog have also made the major local IC companies do not forget. So they are also like the international giants, are waving their acquisition sticks, expanding their product range, seeking new development, Ziguang integration exhibition sharp and Rideco is a good example. But in addition to them, there are many related integrations in the country that are being staged:
First of all, domestic and global capacitive fingerprint recognition leader. As we all know, Huiding Technology relies on fingerprint identification chips, which have developed rapidly in the past few years, but in recent years, due to the influence of market conditions, their performance is also facing tremendous pressure. They also said in this year's semi-annual report that the company's biggest source of revenue in recent years has come from fingerprint identification chips. However, the capacitive fingerprint products have been saturated since the overall mobile phone market in 2017, and the large-scale use of small sensors has limited the existing capacitive fingerprint market. In the first half of 2018, the company's fingerprint chip shipments increased compared with the first half of 2017, and the market share increased. However, due to the relatively mature product technology, product prices were affected by market competition and product mix, which affected the company's profitability during the reporting period. In the future, we expect to stabilize prices through further increase in market share.
I saw this development trend very early. In the beginning of this year, Huiding announced that it will use its own funds of 15 million US dollars to increase the capital of the wholly-owned subsidiary Huiding Hong Kong by cash contribution. After the capital increase, it will acquire Germany through mergers and acquisitions. A 100% stake in Commsolid GmbH, the capital contribution price includes a transfer price of 9 million euros minus net operating capital, and a reserve of $1.5 million in equivalent euros. Germany is a company that develops, manufactures and markets product, computer programs, engineering and consulting services in the information technology and communications industries, providing leading ultra-low power solutions for the IoT market. Huiding's acquisition is to enhance the company's layout in this area and reduce the risk of business operations. According to Zhang Fan, CEO of Huiding: "We can't just eat a bowl of rice, and we won't be guarded by a technology."
Zhaoyi Innovation is also an active pioneer. His peace of mind can also make many peers learn.
According to the data, the company reorganized in 2012 was first known as Nor Flash. In 2013, they invested their general-purpose MCUs in the market, and in the next few years, they pushed forward the simultaneous development of these two product lines. And become a leader in related fields in China. But their goal is far more than that.
On the one hand, Zhaoyi Innovation signed the “Cooperation Agreement on Memory R&D Project” with Hefei Industrial Investment Holding (Group) Co., Ltd. on October 26, 2017, and invested in the layout of domestic DRAM; In March of this year, they announced that they would spend 1.7 billion to acquire the top three players in China's fingerprint identification. According to their announcement at the time, in addition to being able to obtain the capacitive fingerprint recognition and optical fingerprinting solutions that Siliwei now has, Zhaoyi Innovation will invest more money into the 14nm process embedded heterogeneous AI inference signal processing. The development of products such as chip, 30MHz active ultrasonic CMEMS technology and transducer sensor strengthens the layout of the company's products.
Will Semiconductor, which focuses on R&D, sales, and distribution of devices such as TVS, MOSFETs, power management chips, and RF circuits, announced in August that it will acquire three companies. The final targets are two CMOS images, Howell Technology and Spiek. Sensor company.
Because of the rapid driving and automatic development of ADAS, the development of dual-camera and three-camera smartphones has brought huge demand for CMOS image sensors, which will bring relatively strong growth in the next few years. The purpose of the company is also obvious.
Beijing Junzheng and Siyuan Electric have a deep accumulation of Beijing in the field of storage (DRAM, SRAM, NOR Flash, analog circuits and mixed-signal products, products mainly used in automotive electronics, industrial manufacturing, communications equipment and other industries) interest. It is worth mentioning that this was once the target of Zhaoyi Innovation.
Founded in 2005, Beijing Junzheng's main products are based on various products developed by MIPS. In the era of no unified operating system, the unique low-power characteristics of Junzheng products have made them popular in the market. They have entered fingerprint recognition, learning machines, dot reading machines, electronic dictionaries, PMPs, e-books, netbooks, and student computers. Wait for multiple segments to get good performance.
However, after the Android and iOS systems dominated the rivers and lakes, Arm won almost all the markets, and the smart phones almost replaced the market that the above-mentioned Jun was aiming at. This made the company with its ecological problems gradually drift away from the market. Since the listing in 2011, three years ago, the performance of the non-profit growth of 70 times, the performance of Junzheng began to show a downward trend. Although in the last two years, with the performance of the smart watch chip, Jun Zheng has improved. But they still want to go far from their peak. In order to find a new way out, Jun is aiming at the success.
Siyuan Electric is a company that does research and development of electronic technology. It has nothing to do with integrated circuit chips. According to their statement, by investing in Beijing Fucheng, the company will further improve the strategic layout from power transmission and distribution equipment to integrated circuits, which is beneficial to the company. The expansion of business development, the construction of an industrial ecosystem, and comprehensively enhance the company's core competitiveness. Wentai Technology, which is the mobile phone solution, also launched the acquisition of Anshi Semiconductor with the same purpose. There is also the recent merger of Shanghai Tower and Advanced Semiconductor.
It can be seen from the above that in the case that foreign mergers and acquisitions are now hindered, domestic semiconductor companies have begun to strengthen their local alliances. Looking forward to the near future, domestic integrated circuit companies will find a day in China's semiconductor industry.