Memory chips are one of the three major categories of integrated circuits, with a wide range of applications, accounting for about one-third of the total number of chips. Therefore, memory chips reflect the level of semiconductor development in a country or region to a certain extent.
Memory chips rose from the United States, then Japanese companies rose, and then South Korean companies took the lead, and we have only begun to break through in recent years. Even so, it was targeted by Micron.,After being taught a lesson, it was officially announced recently.,Show goodwill again!
Our continent is the world's largest chip consumer market, and we need to consume a very large number of chips every year, but the chip self-sufficiency rate is very low, and most chips mainly rely on imports, so the mainland is also the world's largest procurement place for memory chips.
However, in recent years, the two major series of global memory chips DRAM and NAND have been monopolized by American, Japanese and South Korean companies, and storage giants such as Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have made a lot of money, especially Samsung, which has ranked first in the world's memory chips for many years.
Samsung has a market share of more than 40% in memory DRAM and more than 30% in flash NAND.
In the case of memory chips being monopolized by foreign giants, there will be emergencies such as factory fires from time to time, so the price of memory chips will rise rapidly, and we can only be cut leeks by others because memory chips mainly rely on imports.
To break this situation, it is necessary to develop the independent memory chip industry, so as not to be controlled by others all the time.
To this end, our company began to make efforts, and gradually formed a three-legged situation of mainland storage: Hefei Changxin, which is committed to DRAM memory, Yangtze River Storage, which is committed to flash NAND, and Fujian Jinhua, which is dedicated to ordinary storage.
With the efforts of domestic enterprises, domestic memory chips have broken the foreign monopoly, and some technologies have reached the global leading level.
But this quickly attracted the attention of the American side, especially the American storage giant Micron, which is second only to Samsung and SK hynix in global storage, ranking third with a DRAM share of 25% and NAND ranking fifth with a share of 12% in 2022.
But Micron, who is in this position, also seems to feel a certain sense of crisis when it sees the rise of our domestic storage.
As a result, Micron has been lobbying the United States in recent years, lobbying as many as 170 times in the past five years, and even spent $95.4 billion for this, the purpose of which is to actively promote the United States to suppress the development of our domestic storage.
As a result, the United States added restrictions on memory chips to the new export control regulations issued in October last year.
Not only that, the US side has also added YMTC to the so-called "entity list". Because YMTC has developed very fast, it has created its own XTACking architecture, and the 232-layer NAND chip has achieved mass production ahead of the three storage giants.
That's not all, what's even more infuriating is that Micron has been targeting Fujian Jinhua. After the establishment of Fujian Jinhua, it chose to cooperate with the Taiwanese enterprise UMC, and Jinhua provided 300 million US dollars to purchase R&D equipment and entrusted UMC to develop DRAM-related technologies.
Later, it was sued by Micron, accusing UMC employees of stealing Micron's DRAM trade secrets and allegedly helping Jinhua research and development. Subsequently, the United States added Fujian Jinhua to the "entity list" and wanted three people, including the general manager of Jinhua.
Later, UMC paid a $60 million fine to the United States and reached a settlement with Micron, but Jinhua's development stalled.
In May this year, the Cyberspace Administration of China launched a safety review of Micron's products in China, and found that there were serious safety problems and restricted the procurement of important departments.
This directly caused Micron to lose a huge amount, about 38$500 million in revenue was affected, and if it is not resolved, it may lose more share. As a result, Micron began to show goodwill, and the president visited China twice to communicate, and also invested 4.3 billion yuan to expand the Xi'an factory.
Recently, the news came that Micron and Fujian Jinhua reached a global settlement, which should be an important move to try to repair the relationship.
In this regard, some foreign media directly said that Micron is showing favor again, because if Micron does not work hard to solve the problem, then it is likely to lose the market on our side in the future, so Micron will actively communicate and take practical actions.
In this way, the follow-up development of Fujian Jinhua will face fewer difficulties, and it will be able to gradually recover, and the missing foot of our mainland storage tripartite will be filled, which is more conducive to the development of domestic storage and further reduces foreign dependence