my country imported 2420.7 billion yuan of integrated circuits, and the semiconductor materials market is expected to explode

Recently, news reports said that last year, China purchased 543.5 billion integrated circuits from overseas, a year-on-year increase of 22.1%. In terms of amount, the total import value of integrated circuits increased by 14.8% year-on-year to 2.4207 trillion yuan, making it one of China's largest imported commodities, more than double the import value of China's bulk commodity, oil (1.22 trillion yuan).

Because the Chinese market has strong demand for products such as chips, exporters from Japan and South Korea have also benefited from this and made a lot of money. According to data released by the Korea International Trade Association (KITA), the country's semiconductor exports reached US$99.2 billion in 2020, the second highest export performance in history.

From January to September 2020 alone, China purchased $28.6 billion worth of Korean semiconductors, becoming the largest buyer of Korean semiconductors, accounting for more than 41.5% of South Korea's total semiconductor exports.

The Nikkei Chinese website also reported that due to the continued supply gap in China's high-end semiconductor products and the chip export ban initiated by the United States in September last year, Japan's second-hand semiconductor equipment is becoming popular among Chinese buyers.

Some practitioners in the Japanese second-hand market revealed that the price of local second-hand semiconductor equipment has risen by about 20% in the past 12 months. Previously, a media report showed that from August to November 2020, 22% of China's semiconductor imports came from South Korea, and the United States accounted for only 5%.

As the world's largest producer of electronic products, China has a particularly strong demand for chips. The domestic semiconductor market accounts for nearly one-third of the global market, but the domestic semiconductor self-sufficiency rate is very low, especially the extreme shortage of core chips, and the domestic market share is almost zero. In addition to increasing imports from overseas, increasing the supply capacity of domestic companies is also an "important trick" for China to solve the bottleneck problem in the chip field.

On March 1, my country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stated that from 2021 to 2025, China will "work hard" in five aspects: taxation, chip industry foundation, talent reserve, ecology, and international cooperation to accelerate the process of localization of chips in my country. Wu Hanming, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said on the 17th that the current development of my country's chip manufacturing capacity lags seriously behind demand, and the gap between supply capacity and demand is getting bigger and bigger.

At the current rate, in a few years, the gap between China's production capacity and demand will be at least equivalent to eight times the current production capacity of SMIC, so production expansion must be accelerated. Yang Shaohui of BOC Securities believes that with the climax of domestic wafer fab construction, the semiconductor material market will usher in an explosion, and the prospects for localization are very broad.

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