China To Spend $47 Billion In Bid To Become 3rd-Largest Global Chip Manufacturer (reuters.com) 53
An anonymous reader writes: In an interview with Reuters, the head of China's Tsinghua Unigroup has revealed they will invest 300 billion yuan ($47bn) over the next five years with the ambition of becoming the world's third largest chip-maker. The state-backed company, also the technological investment arm of Tsinghua University, is in talks with an unnamed U.S. company (most likely Micron) though Zhao discounts the possibility of buying a controlling share as politically insensitive.
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They need to be dealt with, but there are a whole lot of other people that have their own wants and needs completely irrespective of Daesh. T
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Tell that to the civilians in Paris. Do you want to wait till the crazies reach your town?
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Politically insensitive.
Apparently their PR is trying to garner sympathy from SJWs by standing up to the bully regulators who might stop the buyout.
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from the article
"Currently, Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) holds the No.3 position in the global chip rankings, behind Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) and market leader Intel Corp (INTC.O), which has a market capitalization of $151.5 billion."
Re:Wuda Figered CN was #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Qualcomm doesn't manufacture chips though: they design them. They're a fabless semiconductor company.
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Qualcomm licenses/patents their wares. The don't manufacture them.
That model would never wrk in China--they would clone it and screww Qualcomm over the license fees. They don't respect IP laws, mind that standards trade secrets and such. It's when they could lose the entire market they would comply. Otherwise the gov't promotes piracy & disrespect for IP. If anything thse practices will give way if they want the entire market....
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More and more the world moves to standardized building blocks, open design specifications, clone off those designs manufacturing along with more and more accessible and affordable at home design and prototype fabrication. In 10-15 years chip features will no longer be shrinking, the technology and design tools will embrace an open commodity standard and I'll be able
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If you read the article or look at wikipedia you'll see that Intel is easily #1 (by revenue.)
Consider that they design and manufacture most processors in laptops and desktops and that those chips are a lot more expensive than generic ICs.
Then it's Samsung, Qualcomm (who doesn't actually fab their own stuff), and Micron. I don't think they're including foundries but even if you included those TSMC would probably only be #3 (or a very close #4.)
No other foundry even comes close to top 10 semiconductor company
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All those Chinese nationals working for current western semiconductor companies... you don't think that's a coincidence, do you?
I have it from reliable sources that they are always expected to "bring something home" when they return even for visiting family. Some don't because of their own ethics but there is a push to do it.
they have root in major US company networks (Score:5, Insightful)
China has infiltrated the networks of most major US companies, so in all likelihood all of the schematics and blueprints from Intel are available to them, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. China is far and away the world leader in computer espionage, certainly in terms of the relentless volume of constant attacks and probably also in the sophistication of their best attacks. Some companies block all of China's IP space from accessing their networks because the daily attacks are relentless.
We can assume that any technology US or European companies have is in the hands of the Chinese government, or soon will be. Keep in mind too this electronics company is part of the Chinese government - the same organization that employs armies of hackers. So if not a question of if the government will provide this IP to the company- the government -is- the company and company is the government.
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What are you talking about? The Chinese have been making knock-offs of microchips for decades, and they are a power-house of child labor-powered, sub living-wage, sub human rights manufacturing. They don't need any technology of their own to do what they already do, they're just looking to scale up production and pirate new markets.
There, fixed that for you.
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Both. Just like everyone else.
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It costs money to make stuff. China got where it is today because it could make stuff cheaper.c
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What we in the US need to do and spread the wealth around to our population with a minimum income that we grow as much as possible and invest it in India and china so that chinese industry borrows
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yes, no different from the 1400 Spain, 1500's UK, 1800's US, but hasn't the world advance a little in the last 150yrs?
That question works against your argument too. Why would China stew in such an ancient state of affairs when via the "cheaper" methods you complain about, they are building a modern economy?
Re:47 Billion of our money (Score:5, Insightful)
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After the great stock market crash, a reg was put in place that required that all executives not own any stock in the industry that they were working in. As such, they made correct choices for the company and not for themselves. Since reagan rolled that back, the executives have shifted from being paid wages (with normal taxation), along with a bonus for profit performance, to paying themselves with massive stock options in which they pay little t
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No, during a start-up, that is different. Basically, these are the owners that have stock options PRIOR to it going public. However, once you go public, then you would no longer get stock or options in the publicly traded stock.
the one issue that I see is that now that so many LBO groups exists out there, what will it mean when they take a company private? I assume that it is like having it back to start-up phase. As such, any executives in that time, can get all of the options that they want. Howev
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That doesn't sound like the Chinese.
"to a low price"
That part does.
There are Chinese manufacturers aplenty making PCBs but if you actually want quality boards that consistently work and if populated are populated with the components you specified you order us or european boards and pay the couple dollars more.
At some point a lower price is actually more expensive due to the quality sacrifice to get there.
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To compete against intel, you must make a x86 compatible CPU, and due the ridiculously huge warchest of patents intel and AMD, only those two can do it without getting sued to hell and back.
The real issue is (Score:2)
Regardless of the investment stated the problem with this countries "state owned" businesses are that profit isn't needed as quickly as other markets.
Even if 76 billion is the initial commitment, they can sell at a loss for years until there's no competition.
Then what?
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knock offs (Score:2)
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of existing chips of course.
Here in 'Murika people used to dismissively say the same about Japanese electronics in the 60's. See how well that hubris worked for us.
Baked-in malware and counterfeit silicon (Score:1)
INB4 modding me down for China-bashing by the China shills.
Tsinghua University is controlling interest. (Score:3)
Their Wikipedia page says nothing about their EE department. I took a quick look at their EE dept. faculty page [tsinghua.edu.cn] and, while large, don't seem to be doing much in chip design or fabrication.
Can someone with more knowledge of the University provide some insight on its relationship to the Chinese military and national government? Has anybody here worked with current Tsinghua University faculty?
Micron is an odd choice (Score:2)
A good chunk of Micron's chip manufacturing capacity is via IMFT, which is a joint venture with Intel (hence the Intel Micron Flash Technologies Inc.) and I really doubt the US government would let them buy Micron...
On the other hand, there are a bunch of chip manufactures in Taiwan (like TSMC or UMC) that they could buy, or even a bunch of Chinese manufacturers like SMIC that they could buy and expand.