Decades ago, an esteemed analyst of memory technology predicted that the “Chinese would never succeed in the memory business.”
Written by Junko Yoshida for Yole Group – The conventional wisdom was that the Chinese expertise is so far behind to manufacture semiconductors.
How wrong we were
China, since its first photovoltaic (PV) cell production line into operation in 2002, quickly took charge of the global PV panel market. Lidars are now made by China’s local lidar suppliers like Hesai and RoboSense. They are embraced by China’s EVs and AVs companies such as BYD, Li Auto, and Xpeng. who are all the range at every automotive trade show.
Western pundits had long assumed the West could rest on a 10 to 20-year head start.
The latest report by Yole Group, Status of the Wafer Fab Equipment Industry 2025, however, paints a different picture.
A slew of Chinese WFE vendors have emerged. Even though their global market share remains minuscule, this follows a familiar playbook for ascension to the big time.
Chinese WFE vendors, lavished with government subsidies, are taking a “step-by-step” approach with “good enough” technologies that cater to the needs of local chip foundries, observed Jean-Christophe Eloy, founder and president of Yole Group.
Yole Group expects the overall global WFE market to reach $184 billion by 2030, $151 billion in equipment shipments and $33 billion in services.
The WFE market has seen “massive investment both in leading-edge (300mm), and legacy 200mm wafers for [producing] power electronics, image sensors and all other semiconductor devices,” noted Jean-Christophe Eloy, founder and president of Yole Group.
Compared to annual growth of about 10 percent among semiconductor manufacturing equipment vendors in Europe, the US, and Japan over the last five years, “Chinese WFE manufacturers have been growing by 30 to 40 percent,” he added.
Naura Technology Co., China’s largest semiconductor equipment manufacturer, typifies the trend. It has already cracked the world’s top 10 chipmaking equipment vendors
Taguhi Yeghoyan, PhD, Principal Analyst, Semiconductor Equipment at Yole Group and author of the Yole Group’s WFE report, emphasized that the global sales trajectory for WFE is “driven by external factors, such as geopolitics.”… Full article
Source: www.semiconductordigest.com
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