The mobile phone war among domestic chip giants
Latest update time：2020-07-31
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Because of its huge capacity, the mobile phone chip market has attracted more and more semiconductor manufacturers to invest in it over the past decade. This is particularly evident in mainland China. Among them, the most eye-catching must be Huawei HiSilicon and Unisoc.
As the world's leading smartphone SoC suppliers, Huawei HiSilicon and Unisoc have been committed to improving their SoC performance over the past few years. At the same time, they have also expanded in multiple directions such as Bluetooth, WiFi and RF to enhance their influence in the mobile phone chip market. In addition to these two giants, there are several rising stars in the domestic mobile phone chip market. Let us take stock of them for everyone.
Zhuoshengwei's RF ambition
Due to the surge in market value, Zhuoshengwei has gained a lot of popularity in the past year. From the perspective of Zhuoshengwei's development, at the beginning of its establishment, the company entered the mobile phone RF chip market with its two core products, RF switches and LNA chips. Later, its products were favored by many mobile phone manufacturers such as Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, vivo, OPPO, etc., and Zhuoshengwei grew up. According to relevant data, its global market share of RF switches has reached 5%.
With the implementation of 5G commercialization, more and more RF chips are needed for mobile phones. International manufacturers who master high-end RF front-end have a huge advantage in this market environment. In order to improve its own market competitiveness and further enhance the level of domestic RF front-end chips, Zhuoshengwei disclosed its 3 billion yuan fixed increase plan in May this year, which is aimed at the R&D and industrialization projects of high-end RF filter chips and modules and the R&D and industrialization projects of RF devices for 5G communication base stations.
Zhuoshengwei announced that by investing resources with Foundry to establish a front-end wafer production line, it aims to further expand high-end filter products, seize the market share of high-end RF filters, cover various application scenarios in low, medium and high frequency bands, and establish a complete RF filter product line. The products of this project will be mainly used in mobile smart terminal devices. The research and development of high-end filters can realize the complete industrialization layout of the company's filter product line in the field of mobile smart terminals.
We have seen that Zhuoshengwei's layout in the PA field has been particularly frequent in the past two years. Previously, in Zhuoshengwei's prospectus for listing on the Growth Enterprise Market in 2019, it was also shown that the company is actively deploying RF power amplifier chip and module research and development and industrialization projects. Recently, the well-known blogger "Mobile Chip Expert" revealed that Zhuoshengwei will acquire a domestic PA company, which caused an uproar in the industry.
Looking back at the development of international RF giants Qorvo, Skyworks and Avago (Broadcom), their product lines cover all aspects of the RF field, and mergers and acquisitions have also played an important role in their development process. It is reasonable for Zhuoshengwei to choose to develop in this way. According to their plan, the company's product line is gradually expanding from RF switches and LNA chips to the PA field. At the same time, combined with Zhuoshengwei's previous plan for a private placement, mobile smart terminal devices are an important technology landing scenario. In this way, it will surely accelerate the expansion of Zhuoshengwei's mobile phone product line.
But in fact, in addition to Zhuoshengwei, there are three other domestic chip companies that are also making frequent moves in the mobile phone battlefield. Among them, acquisition is one of their means to achieve rapid expansion of product lines.
Goodix Technology's multi-point layout
In the past few years, Goodix Technology has become famous in the mobile phone chip market with its capacitive fingerprint chip. From the perspective of its development trajectory, Goodix Technology launched the world's first fingerprint chip with integrated fingerprint and touch technology, and with its optical fingerprint solution, Goodix Technology has entered the supply chain of Huawei and Xiaomi. In 2016, its performance was fully exploded. Since then, Goodix Technology has been at the forefront of the market. According to the "Global Fingerprint Recognition Chip Market Tracking and Forecast Report", Goodix Technology's fingerprint chip shipments in 2018 surpassed Sweden's FPC to reach 285 million, ranking first in the world.
In April this year, Goodix Technology once again achieved great results in the field of fingerprint chips. According to the Securities Times, Goodix Technology officially became the provider of Samsung's under-screen optical fingerprint solution for the first time. The recognition of the product by international giants further demonstrated their well-deserved strength and brought rich profits to the company, but they were not satisfied with this.
In April this year, at the 2019 annual report and the first quarter of 2020 financial report conference of Goodix Technology, Zhang Fan, chairman of Goodix Technology, admitted that the company currently has few product lines that make significant contributions to sales revenue, and the company hopes to expand the depth and breadth of its product lines through continuous R&D investment. The products it is targeting include audio amplifiers, ToF and Bluetooth LE Audio, as well as other products.
Goodix completed
the acquisition
of NXP's VAS business in February this year
, which is another move to attack the mobile phone market. According to the information from the acquired party, NXP's VAS solution is mainly used in smart phones, smart wearables, IoT and other fields, and mobile phones are its main application scenario. From Goodix's perspective, through this acquisition, Goodix will make efforts in three fields: Class D audio amplifiers, smart tactile drivers, and voice and audio software solutions, and fully enter the audio market.
In addition, the TWS headset wave swept the entire mobile phone market last year, and under this wave, Goodix Technology launched its wearing detection and touch application solutions for TWS headsets. Goodix Technology stated on the interactive platform that the wearing detection and touch application solutions provided by Goodix have the advantages of occupying less headset space, no holes are required on the surface of the headset, and can provide users with excellent wearing and interactive experience. It is reported that the solution has been mass-produced on vivo TWS and OPPO Enco Free headsets. At the same time, Goodix Technology also stated that the company will continue to work hard to launch new products in this direction, and in 2020 there will be a large number of TWS headset products equipped with Goodix's solutions.
Will shares expansion from CIS
If we count the dark horses in the domestic mobile phone chip market, Will Semiconductor must be the most noteworthy one, because the CIS manufactured by OmniVision Technologies, which they acquired, is one of the hottest components in this market in recent years. According to a research report by market analysis agency Counterpoint Research, the sales volume of CMOS image sensors (CIS) for smartphone applications has increased eightfold in the past decade, reaching 4.5 billion in 2019. This number will also benefit from the growth in demand for quad-cameras, and its shipments will continue to grow in the high single digits this year.
In this field, OmniVision Technologies has certain advantages.
According to relevant statistics, OmniVision Technology ranks third in the mobile phone CIS market, second only to Sony and Samsung, and has a relatively complete product system. Since 2016, OmniVision has been coveted by many companies after its privatization reform. Among them, Will Semiconductor has twice initiated the acquisition of OmniVision Technology (the first time was due to the disapproval of some shareholders of Will Semiconductor, which led to the termination of the acquisition plan).
On August 15, 2018, Will Semiconductor once again released a major asset restructuring transaction plan. According to public information, in this plan, Will Semiconductor intends to purchase 96.08% of Beijing OmniVision held by 27 shareholders, 42.27% of Sipix held by 8 shareholders, and 79.93% of VisionSource held by 9 shareholders by issuing shares.
After multiple reviews by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and the China Securities Regulatory Commission, Will Semiconductor's acquisition of OmniVision Technologies was finally finalized in August 2019. With this, Will Semiconductor has become the world's third largest CMOS sensor company and the largest in China.
In the CIS field, in addition to the acquisition of OmniVision Technologies, Will Semiconductor also acquired Sipix to lay out the mid- and low-end CIS. After completing these two acquisitions, the two will play a synergistic role to help Will Semiconductor's layout in the CIS field. From the current results, according to the 2019 annual financial report released by Will Semiconductor, under the joint efforts of OmniVision Technologies and Sipix in the CIS field, CIS products have accounted for 71.74% of Will Semiconductor's operating income in 2019.
Will Semiconductor's CIS blueprint does not stop here. In June of this year, Will Semiconductor also disclosed a plan for the public issuance of convertible corporate bonds. The company plans to issue convertible bonds to raise no more than 3 billion yuan (inclusive). According to the plan, after deducting the issuance costs, the funds raised this time will be used for wafer testing and wafer reconstruction production line projects (Phase II), CMOS image sensor product upgrades and replenishment of working capital. According to the announcement released by Will Semiconductor, the implementing entity of these two projects is OmniVision Technologies. From this, it is not difficult to see that Will Semiconductor has made many efforts to improve OmniVision Technologies' market competitiveness.
For OmniVision, the mobile phone market is a good one. Judging from the new products recently released by OmniVision, they are also expanding other product lines in the mobile phone field besides CIS. TDDI is another of their goals.
In April this year, Will Semiconductor announced that it would acquire Synaptics' Asian TDDI business for US$120 million to expand the company's influence in the mobile phone field. The so-called TDDI is an integrated chip that integrates display driver IC and touch IC. In recent years, this technology has gradually become the mainstream technology for mobile terminal display and touch. Mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei, Samsung, and Xiaomi have adopted this technology. After Will Semiconductor completes this acquisition, it can increase the company's product layout in the touch and display driver chip business field and realize the company's coordinated development in various product fields. On the other hand, a large number of mobile phone manufacturers are currently located in Asia, which will further help Will Semiconductor gain an advantage in the mobile phone chip market.
In addition, the TWS field is also a market that OmniVision Technologies is optimistic about. Recently, they released a new Mic solution that meets the ANC function and TWS noise reduction requirements - WMM7027ATHD1. Official data shows that this product can improve the acoustic performance of the chip while further reducing the size, providing better noise reduction effects for TWS products.
Mobile phone chips will bring opportunities to GigaDevice
Another force in the domestic mobile phone chip market is GigaDevice, the largest domestic flash memory chip design company in China. In 2019, GigaDevice adjusted its organizational structure based on its business operations and established a three-division structure with storage +
MCU
+
sensor
as the core. The current business layout is divided into three major directions: storage, MCU and sensor.
Among the three major application scenarios of GigaDevice, mobile phones are undoubtedly a key area.
From the storage perspective, GigaDevice has expanded into the fields of NAND Flash and DRAM after NOR Flash. In recent years, with Samsung, Micron, Hongwang and other companies withdrawing from or reducing NOR Flash business, GigaDevice has the opportunity to develop NOR Flash. At the same time, according to relevant research reports, the driving force of NOR Flash mainly comes from TWS wireless headphones, smartphone AMOLED and TDDI, which also enables GigaDevice's NOR Flash to find new opportunities in the mobile phone market. According to relevant reports, AirPods2 uses GigaDevice's NOR Flash.
In terms of DRAM, on September 30, 2019, GigaDevice announced the "Plan for the Private Placement of A-Shares", of which 3.324 billion yuan was used for DRAM chip research and development and industrialization projects. GigaDevice's public plan shows that by 2020, the company will complete the definition of its first DRAM chip product, including market positioning, product specification setting and chip design. However, from the perspective of market conditions, the upgrade of smartphone memory capacity has promoted the growth of DRAM. From this point of view, perhaps based on NOR Flash's experience in the mobile phone market, GigaDevice's DRAM will also expand into the mobile phone market.
In terms of sensors, GigaDevice is developing into the field of fingerprint recognition chips. To this end, GigaDevice acquired Silead in 2019 and began to deploy in the field of fingerprint recognition ICs. According to the 21st Century Business Herald, in 2018, as Silead entered the under-screen fingerprint industry chain and supplied mobile phone manufacturers, its performance achieved rapid growth. In the third quarter of 2018, Silead's under-screen optical fingerprint was mass-produced, and it became the only domestic supplier of optical fingerprint chips that can be mass-produced and supplied except Goodix Technology. Through this acquisition, GigaDevice will also gain new support in the mobile phone market.
Conclusion
In fact, in addition to the above manufacturers, Wingtech Technology is also a company that must be mentioned in the field of domestic mobile phone chips. Through the evaluation of Anshi Technology, the company has also transformed from a former solution provider to a chip supplier.
It is true that mobile phones, as consumer electronic products with a fast replacement rate, have brought prosperity to the semiconductor industry. Especially in the past two years, the arrival of new technologies such as 5G and TWS has brought new vitality to the mobile phone market. Under this change, it is also a good choice for domestic chip giants to enter the mobile phone market.
As competition in the mobile phone market becomes increasingly fierce, these chip giants have to not only speed up the replacement of existing products, but also expand their product lines to enhance their own strength. Among them, acquisitions have become a way with a higher rate of return. Therefore, we have also seen that these domestic chip giants have begun to frequently make moves to lay out mobile phone chips.
Among so many acquisitions, almost all of them are mergers and acquisitions between giants. Perhaps with the strong combination, domestic mobile phone chips will usher in another level of development. At the same time, we also noticed that in many mergers and acquisitions that have occurred, many companies have their eyes on the same business. This may also make the mobile phone chip market an increasingly fierce battlefield for these domestic chip giants.
From the growth of these companies, we can also see the progress of the domestic semiconductor industry in the capital market and technology.
*Disclaimer: This article is originally written by the author. The content of the article is the author's personal opinion. Semiconductor Industry Observer reprints it only to convey a different point of view. It does not mean that Semiconductor Industry Observer agrees or supports this point of view. If you have any objections, please contact Semiconductor Industry Observer.
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