According to the financial report released recently, in the third quarter of 2019, TSMC’s operating profit reached 3.459 billion US dollars, an increase of more than 13% over the same period in 2018. Data from market research firm TrendForce also shows that in the third quarter of 2019, TSMC’s global foundry market share reached 50.5%, an increase of 1.3 percentage points from the previous quarter, while Samsung’s market share was only 50.5%. Maintaining 18.5%, which is a far cry from that, makes Samsung’s chances of becoming the leader in system semiconductors by 2030, which it vowed to achieve even more difficult.
A few days ago, it was reported that HiSilicon, a subsidiary of Huawei, is currently the manufacturer with the highest proportion of orders from TSMC. At present, only TSMC and Samsung have advanced process technology below 7 nanometers among the global foundry companies. Huawei HiSilicon only continues to place orders with TSMC, which will continue to marginalize Samsung. Especially when TSMC’s 7-nanometer production capacity is fully loaded, TSMC also provides Huawei HiSilicon with a certain scale of production capacity to produce HiSilicon’s Kirin mobile processors.
Market participants pointed out that with the strong support of Huawei and the help of orders from other customers including Apple, MediaTek, AMD, Xilinx, etc., TSMC is also adopting a more active development strategy. For example, TSMC plans to increase its capital expenditure in 2019 to $15 billion, an increase of about 40% from its previous estimate, and has begun to aggressively purchase EUV extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These situations all show the continuous growth of TSMC in the foundry industry.
In contrast, Samsung, in addition to the “System semiconductor Vision Oath Conference” held at the Hwaseong factory in South Korea in April 2019, Samsung announced that it will invest a large amount of money, hoping to become the world’s leading system Semiconductor in 2030. In addition, Samsung also proposed The development of the related semiconductor industry, including the investment plan for the neural network processor NPU, and the announcement of the blueprint for the development of wafer foundry technology using EUV lithography technology, in order to hope to overtake TSMC in one fell swoop.
However, although Samsung mass-produced 7-nano chips using EUV technology for the first time in April 2019. However, its market share in the global foundry market fell from 19.1% in the first quarter of 2019 to 18% in the second quarter. During this period, in addition to continuing to mass-produce the Kirin 980 chip, Huawei also launched the Kirin 990 chip in September due to the localization of chips. This is a mobile processor equipped with a 5G baseband chip and the first to borrow The 5G mobile processors mass-produced by TSMC’s 7nm+ process with EUV technology are expected to be used in Huawei’s 5G-enabled smartphones.
The report further stated that 70% of smartphones produced by Huawei are equipped with mobile processors designed by HiSilicon. Therefore, Huawei’s market share in the global mobile processor market is expected to grow in 2019. According to the survey results of the market research unit, Huawei ranked 5th in the mobile processor market with a market share of 10% in 2018. By the first quarter of 2019, Huawei’s share of the global smartphone market reached 17%, second only to Samsung. As a whole, in the first nine months of 2019, its total smartphone sales increased by 26% compared with the same period in 2018, reaching 185 million units, which will increase the market share of HiSilicon mobile processors. ‘s revenue.
In fact, market participants believe that while TSMC is preparing a more aggressive development plan, the order to connect with Huawei will become a strong alliance. In addition, TSMC is aiming to widen the gap with Samsung, including the expected full acquisition of EUV equipment produced by Dutch semiconductor manufacturer ASML in 2019, and plans to build the world’s first 3-nanometer fab in Nanke by the end of 2019. Moreover, in addition to Huawei, TSMC also has orders from customers such as Apple, AMD, MediaTek, and Xilinx.