China Unleashes a Chip War: WSJ

choi

Bob Davis and Eva Dou, China Unleashes a Chip War; The global semiconductor industry is succumbing to fierce nationalistic competition. Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2017 (front page).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chi ... hegemony-1501168303

Quote:

"WUHAN, China—At a muddy construction site the size of 12 baseball stadiums * * * Truck after truck delivers steel rods to China’s Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd., a state-owned firm that's spending $24 billion to build the country's first advanced memory-chip factories. [the preceding is the first 1 1/2 paragraphs, to be followed HERE by the last paragraph in print (online there are 4 more paragraphs)] * * * After Unigroup's plan to acquire Micron fell apart, it hired Charles Kau 高啟全, the former head of Micron's Taiwan joint-venture [華亞科技, first a joint venture of but later acquired by Micron 美光科技], and other experts from the island [Taiwan]. It announced it would build its own memory chip facility -- the mammoth Wuhan factories -- at about the same price it would have paid for Micron."

"The US views China as its biggest semiconductor challenge since Japan in the late 1980s [which has faded: Intel dominates in logic chips for PC and South Korea overtook Japan in memory chips]. * * * China has advantages Japan didn't [because Japan was not world's workshop]. It is the world's biggest chip market, consuming 58.5% of the global $354 billion semiconductor sales in 2015 according to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. That gives Beijing power to discriminate, if it wants, against overseas suppliers.

"Nearly 90% of the $190 billion worth of chips used in China are imported or produced in China by foreign-owned firms, estimates International Business Strategies Inc., a research firm. Many chips are assembled in Chinese factories into mobile phones and computers for export. The top 10 chip vendors in China by revenue are foreign.

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest, which is inane.
(b) "The US views China as its biggest semiconductor challenge since Japan in the late 1980s"

This sentence is ludicrous to me. China is "world's biggest chip market" all right. But that is because Chinese assemble electronic gadgets.
(c) In print buit not online is an illustration (heading: "China Decides to Cash in on Chips") that consists of four panels. Panel 2 is "Semiconductor revenue, by location of headquarters," (source: Sanford C Bernstein & Co) where American companies (presumably Qualcomm etc) have ~45%.  I fail to find this illustration in the Web.