"Price rising whirlwind" swept chip industry closed test off season is not light
Chip industry chain "price rise wind" blew to close the test link. A representative of a major offshore manufacturer said it is not sure whether the company will follow suit, but capacity is indeed tight, and it is expected that this round of high industry boom may last for 18 months. An executive of one of the mainland's three largest sealing and testing factories also bluntly said that the current sealing and testing industry's boom is indeed in a high position and will continue.
Topology analyst Wang Zunming said he sees room for growth in the fourth quarter as end products such as automotive, large-size panels, 5G communications and WiFi 6 chips continue to Peter out.
Off-season orders are not saturated
In previous years, after the middle and late November, the closed test market entered the traditional off-season, but this year the situation is abnormal.
It is reported that after November, the production capacity of planting ball packaging is full, and the price of IC board is increased due to the shortage. The price of new order has increased by about 20%, and the price of urgent order has increased by 20% to 30%. At present, there is an obvious shortage of production capacity for high-order wafer cladding package, wafer level package, 2.5D/3D package, etc. In addition, the world's leading enterprises will increase the first quarter of next year, the average price of sealed test orders 5% to 10%, in order to cope with IC board price rises and other costs. In this regard, the moonlight in the Chinese Securities Journal reporter interview did not comment.
Mainland head sealing and testing plants are basically in full capacity. Huatian Technology recently accepted the agency survey said that the company's orders are full, the production line is running at full capacity. In response to investors' questions in early November, Tongfu Micro said it is currently a peak season for production and sales, and most of the capacity is saturated.
Wu Tianyu, COO of ASE, said that the company's closed and tested production line is "very full, very tight" and demand has been pouring in. Even if we want to expand capacity, we should also follow the overall expansion of production, and we expect that supply will exceed demand at least until the end of the second quarter of next year.
"From the end market, the current demand for servers, televisions, computers, home office electronic equipment, intelligent entertainment equipment and so on is relatively large, which drives the growth of the demand for related chips," said the representative of the large factory.
Another industry analysis, the original backlog in the IC design plant or IDM plant of wafer inventory, began to release a large number of sealing and testing plant for packaging process production; The automotive electronics market picked up significantly in the fourth quarter, but the chip inventory had already bottomed out, the automotive chip urgent order released on a large scale; The chip content of 5G smart phones is nearly 50% more than that of 4G phones, which requires more packaging capacity support.
Gross profit margin recovery is more obvious
Benefited from the boom recovery, sealed and measured factory profits significantly improved. For example, in the first three quarters, ChangX Technology, the leading company in mainland sealing and testing, achieved revenue of 18.763 billion yuan, up 15.85% year-on-year, with a profit of 764 million yuan and a loss of 182 million yuan in the same period last year. Profits in the third quarter surged to 398 million yuan from 77 million yuan in the same period last year, although third-quarter revenue (6.787 billion yuan) was lower than the same period last year (7.047 billion yuan).
Such as through X micro electricity. The company's revenue in the first three quarters increased 23% year-on-year to 7.419 billion yuan, and the company realized a turnaround from a loss of 27 million yuan to a profit of 262 million yuan. The company said that with the growth of the internal cycle of the economy, domestic customer orders increased significantly; Large international customers further expand their market share by taking advantage of the manufacturing process, and the order demand increases strongly. Large overseas customers have strong demand for communication products and full orders.
In the price rise and the product structure of the two factors resonance, sealed and measured the factory's gross margin recovered significantly. DongCai Choice data show that in the first three quarters of this year, the gross profit margin of long X technology sales are 13.10%, 15.90% and 17.04%, the gross profit margin of micro X sales are 13.06%, 16.88% and 15.94%, China X technology sales gross profit margin are 18.55%, 24.28% and 23.36%.
Topology said end demand has continued to rise since the second quarter as a result of the epidemic's homegrown economy. In the third quarter, the world's top 10 closed beta players' revenue rose to $6.759 billion, up 12.9 percent year on year, thanks to the urgent order effect.
Domestic substitution effect appears
In China's integrated circuit industry chain, the packaging and testing industry is the only industry that can fully compete with international enterprises. The main domestic packaging and testing enterprises have basically kept pace with foreign and joint venture enterprises in terms of technical level, and their competitive strength has gradually increased. At present, the packaging and testing industry has become the most internationally competitive link in China's integrated circuit industry chain, and is expected to take the lead in realizing a comprehensive domestic replacement.
Since the second half of 2019, driven by the acceleration of localization replacement, the sealed testing industry has ushered in a boom cycle, and the rise of application terminals such as 5G, automotive electronics, cloud computing, big data, AI, VR/AR and the Internet of Things, and the demand for sealed testing (especially advanced packaging) will continue to increase.
China science and technology, said X as encapsulation testing domestic enterprises in the BGA, FC, WLCSP, Bumping, TSV, SiP, FO such advanced field layout perfect and advanced packaging capacity continues to release, and merger and acquisition integration continues, domestic enterprises have the ability to undertake the global integrated circuit packaging operations, market size and market concentration is expected to further enhance, the future industry development will enter a new cycle.
It is worth mentioning that, affected by the epidemic, the global economy will decline in 2020, but the global semiconductor market is bucking the trend of growth, especially the Chinese market. According to data released by SIA, the global semiconductor market sales in the first three quarters of this year reached US $319.4 billion, up 5.9% year on year. According to the China Semiconductor Industry Association, sales of China's integrated circuit industry reached 599.58 billion yuan in the first three quarters of this year, up 16.9 percent year on year.