Foxconn also wants to make chips? It has been planning for a long time

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Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou recently reiterated his plan to have Foxconn enter the chip manufacturing field.

Guo Taiming said that Foxconn will "definitely" make its own chips. Recently, he talked about Foxconn's plan to develop the industrial Internet of Things in a speech at Peking University, which requires Foxconn to purchase a large number of sensors and traditional integrated circuit (IC) components, making the group's annual procurement of semiconductor components exceed US$400 million.

Foxconn Chairman: Terry Gou

Foxconn is known to the outside world as a foundry for Apple phones and other electronic products, with very limited technical content. Now, with the fluctuations in Apple's electronic product sales and the thin profit margins of foundry, Foxconn Group is preparing to transform into a company with more technical content and higher profit margins. Recently, the structure was adjusted to establish a "semiconductor sub-group", and the head of this business group is Yong Liu, who is also a member of the board of directors of Foxconn's Japanese Sharp Corporation.

In the global semiconductor industry, Foxconn Group is not a well-known company. In Taiwan, TSMC has developed into a semiconductor foundry company that occupies half of the world's market share, and has even caused antitrust concerns. In addition, UMC is also a long-established semiconductor foundry company.

In preparation for entering the semiconductor manufacturing sector, Foxconn has asked its semiconductor business group to conduct a feasibility study on the construction of two 12-inch chip factories.

12 inches refers to the diameter of the raw material wafer used in semiconductor manufacturing. The larger the wafer size, the higher the semiconductor manufacturing efficiency and the lower the cost.

However, compared with chip design, chip manufacturing is a huge project. Not only does it require tens of billions of dollars to build a factory, but manufacturers also need to accumulate technology and build a talent team in terms of semiconductor manufacturing processes.

In the global market, companies with chip manufacturing businesses such as TSMC, Samsung Electronics, and Intel are launching processes with smaller line widths every year, such as 10 nanometers and 7 nanometers, to compete for production orders from chip design companies such as Apple, Qualcomm, and Huawei.

In terms of semiconductor manufacturing, Foxconn Group, as a newcomer, undoubtedly faces huge technological disadvantages.

Previously, Foxconn Group had bid for the flash memory chip business of Japan's Toshiba Corporation at a sky-high price of US$27 billion, but failed. Foxconn offered a price higher than that of Bain Capital of the United States, but the US and Japanese governments were unwilling to let Toshiba's excellent semiconductor technology (Toshiba invented flash memory) fall into the hands of a Chinese company.

Foxconn CEO Terry Gou expressed dissatisfaction with non-commercial factors involved in the bidding for Toshiba's business. After the failure of the plan to acquire Toshiba's semiconductor business, he did not give up the layout in the chip field and has established a semiconductor business department with more than 100 engineers.

Currently, Foxconn has been strengthening its layout in the semiconductor field and has controlled a number of IC-related companies, including liquid crystal driver IC manufacturer Tianyu Technology, system-level packaging company Xunxin Technology, semiconductor and LED manufacturing equipment manufacturer Peixin Energy Technology, and IC design service company Socle Technology.

Among them, Peixin Energy Technology mainly produces some semiconductor manufacturing equipment, Xunxin Technology is a semiconductor back-end enterprise responsible for system module product packaging, and Tianyu Technology is a chip design company that mainly develops LCD display driver chips.

Source: Comprehensive compilation from the Internet

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