Excerpts, screenshots, and illegal access to Huawei's 40 technical information, the shocking case in the chip industry continues to ferment. A total of 67 people from Shanghai Zunpai Communication Company, including 14 people, including the founder Zhang Kun, were arrested, accounting for more than 20%, and the company was basically finished.
One of the main reasons why Zunpai Communication is so bold is driven by profits. Since its establishment in March 2021, the company has received hundreds of millions of yuan in investment from more than 20 institutions, and there is another 100 million yuan in financing. The global market size of the wifi chips they make will reach $20 billion in 2021.
There are few high-end players, and Huawei is the most powerful, stealing its technology is undoubtedly the fastest profit. At present, this case has been solved, and the next step is to wait for the court to decide.
Huawei's chip technology theft case completely tore the "fig leaf" of domestic chips. Behind the prosperity of the domestic chip industry, there is plagiarism, stealing intellectual property rights, poaching people with high salaries, and vicious competition.
Since Huawei was blocked by the United States in 2019, there has been a boom in self-developed chips in China. Major companies have come out to make cores, and a large number of people in the chip industry have come out to start their own businesses and gain the favor of capital, and the number of chip companies has ushered in explosive growth.
In 2020, 2 new chip-related enterprises will be added310,000, with an increase of 4 in 2021740,000, more than 60,000 in 2022, and a total of more than 130,000 in three years, bringing China's chip-related enterprises to more than 170,000.
Capital is also pouring in, with the investment in the semiconductor industry exceeding 140 billion yuan in 2022, an increase of nearly four times compared with about 30 billion yuan in 2019. Take Xiaomi, which has invested in Zunpai, as an example, in the past few years, it has invested in a total of 110 chip semiconductor-related companies.
However, although there are many chip companies, most of them are concentrated in low-end chips, and there are very few that really have technology. Many of them are like Zhang Kun, who uses high salaries and equity to poach talents, "take shortcuts" with technological infringement, and then burn investors' "money".
Enterprises like this are not here to make cores seriously at all, but actually to make money. It's also not sustainable, and it often ends up going down.
Many chip companies have "disappeared" due to patent infringement, and this time it is a Chinese company like Huawei that has a large number of intellectual property rights.
In 2022, 5,746 companies in the chip industry will disappear, and as of December 11 this year, the number of chip-related companies that have disappeared has reached 1090,000, an increase of 897%。It is expected that in the next few years, more and more chip companies will be eliminated.
The United States is speeding up the blockade of China's high-end chips, not only not selling high-end chips to China, but also restricting the production of China's high-end chips. In this context, it was supposed to give Chinese chip design companies a rare opportunity to fill the market where foreign products voluntarily withdraw.
However, Chinese chip companies are involuting and suffering from many troubles, such as poaching people with 100% high salaries and disrupting the talent marketIllegally obtaining the trade secrets of competitors in various ways;With the way of not hesitating to lose money, low price vicious competition. In the high-end chip market, the breakthroughs have been lackluster.
Huawei's sword against companies that infringe on intellectual property rights this time is undoubtedly tracing the origin of the entire chip industry. There is no shortcut to "core making", there is no way out by plagiarism and theft, and it can't go far. Only down-to-earth and long-term unremitting efforts can we gradually catch up and achieve transcendence.
For China's chip industry, instead of investing funds in these shortcut companies, it is better to concentrate on limited funds and invest limited funds in really powerful enterprises, such as Huawei, SMIC, Shanghai Microelectronics, etc. There is only one Huawei in China, which is too few, and more chip giants that can compete with giants such as Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia are needed.