The United States has been making frequent moves recently. On the one hand, it has given its own chip tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, and has also formed an alliance with Japan and South Korea to develop chips. However, both American chips and South Korean chips are facing inventory problems, and they are overwhelmed. Such actions will only shoot themselves in the foot.
Earlier, TSMC said at the second-quarter performance conference that the coming days may not be so easy. Oversupply of chips has already appeared. Some American chip companies even prefer to pay high liquidated damages to cut orders, including Apple , AMD , NVIDIA, etc. Recently, Intel, the largest chip company in the United States, has suffered a major decline in performance, and American analog chip and radio frequency chip companies have said that their inventory is high and they have aggressively cut prices to sell, all showing that the chip industry has entered a downward cycle.
TSMC’s largest customer is the US chip company. US chips contribute nearly 70% of its revenue, and Apple contributes 26% of its revenue. Such TSMC’s remarks are enough to prove that US chips are indeed difficult to sell. Reduce chip orders without paying high liquidated damages.
In addition to TSMC, another Taiwanese chip company, PSMC, also said that the global chip industry is in recession. PSMC said that the order volume of driver chips, CMOS image sensors, and special DRAMs produced by OEMs is significant. shrinking, and even orders that had been placed before were cancelled.
Until recently, Korean chips also indicated that their inventory surged by nearly 80%. South Korea is the world’s largest manufacturer of memory chips , Samsung is the world’s largest DRAM and NAND flash chip company, and SK Hynix is the world’s second largest DRAM chip Manufacturers, the chips they produce are naturally oriented to the global market.
American chips and South Korean chips both expressed high inventories, proving that the oversupply of the global chip industry has become a reality. It is worth noting that in the face of a mountain of chips, they all expect Chinese companies to help them clear their inventories.
China is the world’s largest chip purchaser. In 2021, China will purchase 400 billion US dollars of chips, accounting for 60% of the global chip market. The huge inventories of American chips and South Korean chips can only be digested by Chinese manufacturing. .
However, in the face of the global chip surplus situation, instead of considering how to solve this problem, the United States intensified its efforts to restrict American chip companies from supplying chips to China and restrict ASML from selling lithography machines to China. This will only further disrupt the global chip industry chain.
In fact, after the United States took measures against Huawei in 2019, various economies have expanded their chip production capacity to ensure industrial security. After several years of hard work, China's chip production capacity has increased to 16% of the global chip market, and China's chip self-sufficiency rate has also been greatly improved. In the first five months of this year, chip imports decreased by 28.3 billion.
Europe has also proposed a $43 billion chip capacity expansion plan, and now the United States has launched a $52 billion chip subsidy plan, which will prompt Europe and China to accelerate their respective chip capacity expansion plans and have a far-reaching impact on the global chip market , which may further exacerbate the global overcapacity of chips.
Faced with the new measures of the United States, ASML said that restricting the sale of lithography machines below 14nm will not help solve the problem. Like the development of Chinese chips, in the face of the arbitrariness of the United States, ASML has accelerated the sales of lithography machines in order to survive.
It can be said that the new measures of the United States will not help solve the inventory problem of American chips and South Korean chips, but may exacerbate this problem.