subject: The Wafer Foundry Industry Witnessed A Prosperous Development In 2010 [print this page] Global and China Wafer Foundry Industry Report, 2010
The year of 2010 has been the best year for wafer foundry industry since 2000. It is expected that the output value of wafer foundry industry will reach USD27.6 billion, up 37.8% year-on-year. In addition, the output value of the entire semiconductor industry is projected to achieve USD274.5 billion, rising 21.5% year-on-year. ( http://www.bharatbook.com/detail.asp?id=149883&rt=Global-and-China-Wafer-Foundry-Industry-Report-2010.html )
The wafer foundry industry witnessed a prosperous development in 2010, as a result of the economic recovery and the fab-lite strategy adopted by many large semiconductor companies. Most of the companies have continued to use existing fabs or produce analog products in their own fabs instead of investing in new fabs, while outsourcing the advanced digital CMOS process to wafer foundries because the R&D of processes at 65-nm and below that requires a huge amount of capital and labor force is unaffordable even to large semiconductor companies. For example, TI announced to outsource the production of the products at 32-nm and below to TSMC. Renesas, Japans biggest semiconductor manufacturer, also announced to outsource the production of its future top-class products to TSMC in July 2010. Thus, the wafer foundry industry will see a higher average growth margin than that of the semiconductor industry in the future. In the meantime, the wafer foundry industry also substantially increased the capital expenditure to improve technology and capacity in 2010. The capital expenditure of TSMC, UMC and Global Foundries will be as high as USD5.9 billion, USD1.9 billion and around USD2.5 billion respectively in 2010, all tripling the figures in 2009.
In 2010, there were some big changes in the wafer foundry industry. Global Foundries (GF), the wafer foundry originated from AMD, became increasingly strong after acquiring Chartered Semiconductor. The emergence of GF ended the competitive structure formed by TSMC, UMC, Chartered Semiconductor and SMIC. SMIC had been lagged far behind, and the operating income was only half of GFs, and its technology was much inferior to GFs as well. As a result, the wafer foundry industry is being dominated by GF, UMC and TMSC. UMC is facing the powerful challenge from GF, and even TMSC dare not underestimate GF.
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