According to businesskorea, some experts said that with the increasingly close cooperation between Huawei and TSMC, Samsung Electronics will face more difficulties in the system semiconductor industry in 2030.
On November 2, the Taiwan Electronics Times and other media reported that Hisilicon, which is owned by Huawei, has the highest proportion of orders for TSMC semiconductors. At present, only Samsung and TSMC in the world's foundry companies have advanced process technologies below 7nm, while Huawei Hisilicon only orders TSMC. TSMC's sub-7nm process line has been filled with orders. Some analysts said that TSMC allocated Hays' orders in advance.
Due to the support of Huawei, TSMC is also adopting a more radical strategy. TSMC plans to increase its investment to US$15 billion this year, an increase of 50% from the beginning of the year, and actively purchase EUV lithography machines. It is worth mentioning that in the third quarter sales, Chinese companies contributed 20%, an increase of 5% over the same period last year. TSMC's reliance on Huawei is increasing.
In April of this year, at the "System Semiconductor Vision Swearing" held by Samsung at the Hwaseong Plant in South Korea, Samsung Vice Chairman Li Zaijun was confident in winning the top spot in the system semiconductor field in 2030. Since then, Samsung has been very active, such as the investment plan for the neural network processor NPU, and announced the road map of foundry technology based on EUV lithography.
Samsung first mass-produced the 7-nano chip based on EUV technology in April this year, but its share in the global foundry market dropped from 19.1% in the first quarter to 18% in the second quarter. Huawei is rapidly expanding its position in the mobile AP market. In September, it launched its Kirin 990 chip, which is an AP equipped with a 5G communication chip and a self-developed NPU. Huawei said that the chip is the first to pass TSMC 7nm EUV. Processed mass production of 5G mobile APs.
Seventy percent of Huawei's smartphones are equipped with HiSilicon-designed APs, so Huawei's share of the global AP market may grow this year. According to market research firm SA, Huawei ranked fifth in the mobile AP market with a market share of 10% last year. In the first quarter of this year, Huawei's share of the global smartphone market was 17%, second only to Samsung. From January to September this year, total smartphone sales increased by 26% year-on-year to 185 million units.
TSMC is preparing a more aggressive growth roadmap and believes it is a strong alliance with Huawei. In addition, TSMC is aiming to expand the gap with Samsung. This year, it will fully acquire the EUV equipment exclusively produced by ASML in the Netherlands, and plans to build a 3nm factory in the technology park in southern Taiwan by the end of this year. In addition to Huawei, TSMC also harvested customers such as Apple, AMD and Qualcomm. In the third quarter of this year, TSMC achieved operating profit of US$3.459 billion, a year-on-year increase of over 13%. According to data from market research firm TrendForce, in the third quarter of this year, TSMC's global OEM market share was 50.5%, an increase of 1.3 percentage points from the previous quarter, and Samsung's market share was only 18.5%, which is far from it.