"The news that Samsung Electronics will launch an acquisition from its semiconductor counterparts is rampant.
Although we have received a negative answer from different media and Samsung, the rumors of two consecutive acquisitions are likely to be groundless and not without cause.
Considering Samsung's current product composition and current industry status, these acquisitions are not impossible for Samsung. Their cash reserves of more than 100 trillion won (about 92 billion US dollars) accumulated by the end of 2018 will be their strong pillar.
Let's talk about Samsung's possible acquisition from the current situation of Samsung Semiconductor.
Pressure of Samsung Electronics: storage and wafer are attacked on both sides
Samsung Electronics has always been concerned by the industry. Since it topped the list of semiconductor chips, it has focused on the market. What pressure does Samsung Electronics face if it wants to defend its crown? The first is the storage defeated by the cycle.
Samsung's memory business can be traced back to 1983. At that time, Samsung built its first chip factory in Qixing area, Gyeonggi province. Samsung Electronics purchased 64K DRAM technology from Meguiar, which encountered financial problems at that time, and the processing technology was obtained from sharp, Japan. In the following years, Samsung continued to increase its investment in memory. Finally, in 1993, it topped the global memory market.
With the continuous development of Samsung's semiconductor business, memory has also become its largest source of revenue. In 2018, Samsung's semiconductor business revenue was 86.29 trillion won, of which memory revenue was 72.38 trillion won, accounting for 84% of its total semiconductor business.
At the same time, the market believes that Samsung Electronics can usher in the highlight moment in 2017, which is also mainly due to the strong performance of memory products. However, memory is a cyclical industry, and the price fluctuates periodically with the change of supply and demand. This situation has also triggered speculation among market institutions about whether they can continue to defend their top position.
Icinsights predicts that in 2019, the memory market will drop by 24%, which will reduce the whole semiconductor market by 7%. This change will promote the ranking reshuffle of semiconductor suppliers. Icinsights said that 83% of Samsung's semiconductor sales, the leading semiconductor supplier last year, came from memory products, which means that this year's memory market will drag down the performance of Korean giants. According to estimates, Samsung's total semiconductor sales this year will fall by 20%.
Samsung's semiconductor business can be said to be both success and failure. Competition from all sides has also added a lot of pressure. In addition to the decline in memory prices, Samsung Electronics also has to face the pressure from traditional memory giants such as SK Hynix, Toshiba and micron to seize the market.
In addition, in the past few years, all over the world began to pay more and more attention to the development of the semiconductor industry, and the related technologies are constantly upgrading and updating. In this process, there is no lack of latecomers. The emergence of many semiconductor upstarts has made the competition in this market more and more intense, which has also brought new pressure to the old giants, including Samsung Electronics.
According to trendforce memory storage research (dramexchange), China's memory industry currently focuses on three camps: Changjiang storage invested in NAND flash market, Hefei Changxin focusing on mobile memory, and Jinhua integration committed to niche memory.
According to the progress of the three manufacturers, the trial production time is expected to be in the second half of 2018. With the mass production of the three camps may fall in the first half of 2019, which reveals that 2019 will become the first year of memory production in China.
Secondly, the road of wafer foundry is also long.
Samsung Electronics launched the wafer foundry business in 2005. At first, this business was mainly oriented to the high-end SOC field, and the market share was not high. However, Samsung has greater ambition. It is convenient for the company to list wafer foundry as an independent business unit in 2017, so as to better serve customers. Samsung Electronics said that the new Department is mainly responsible for producing mobile processors and other non memory chips for customers such as Qualcomm and NVIDIA, competing with pure wafer foundry companies led by TSMC.
In 2017, Samsung's Wafer Foundry Division had a revenue of US $4.6 billion and a market share of 6%, making it the fourth largest wafer foundry in the world. However, Samsung's ambition is not here. At the Samsung wafer foundry forum held in Seoul, South Korea, in early 2018, the relevant person in charge of Samsung said: "the goal of this year is to increase the market share of wafer foundry from the fourth to the second by the end of the year, surpassing liandian and lattice core. In the future, it plans to surpass TSMC.
In order to compete with pure wafer foundry, Samsung Electronics established the "Samsung advanced wafer foundry ecosystem" in early 2018, strengthened the relationship with major customers such as Qualcomm and improved the growth engine.
In February 2018, the new wafer factory of Samsung Electronics in Huacheng City, South Korea was officially started, and it is scheduled to start mass production of chips with a process below 7Nm in the second half of next year. In May 2018, Samsung's device solutions department in charge of chip business set up a wafer foundry R & D center to strengthen its strength in the foundry field and try its best to catch up with TSMC.
In the case of lattice core and liandian successively announcing the postponement of the process below 7Nm, Samsung's actions in wafer foundry in 2018 seem to be pointing to TSMC. In terms of advanced manufacturing processes, TSMC is in an absolute leading position. For example, in the order of 7Nm, it is almost taken over by TSMC, and Samsung has almost no revenue.
In this environment, the acquisition will be the best shortcut for Samsung.
Rumor 1: NXP can kill two birds with one stone for Samsung
In March 2019, according to South Korean media investchosun, Samsung Electronics is considering acquiring NXP, the world's largest automotive chip supplier. The project is reviewed by a team led by Vice President Li Zairong's assistant, President Chung Hyun Ho and vice president Ahn Joong hy. In response to the reports of Korean media, Bloomberg subsequently pointed out that according to an email from Samsung, the media reports were not true, and Samsung Electronics did not consider acquiring NXP.
But from the perspective of business composition, NXP may be a good supplement to Samsung, and even kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it can reduce Samsung's dependence on storage business. On the other hand, NXP is an indispensable heavyweight role in the field of automotive electronics.
As the world's leading automotive electronics supplier, NXP has a good product composition and profound technical accumulation, and the company's business situation is also relatively good. According to the financial report of NXP, the company's revenue in 2018 reached US $9.41 billion, a year-on-year increase of 2%. Among them, the business of automobile and safety connection equipment increased by more than 5%, and the business of safety identification solutions increased by 6%.
According to Richard clemmer, CEO of NXP, "NXP will continue to fully promote the company's long-term development strategy with strong innovative solutions and excellent ability to attract customers." It is precisely because of such a good performance that it attracted Qualcomm's pursuit in the early two years.
Samsung itself is also working on automotive electronics. If it can accept NXP, it will get twice the result with half the effort.
In March 2017, Samsung officially announced that it had officially completed the acquisition of Harman international, the world audio giant. The acquisition, which cost Samsung $8 billion, is the largest acquisition in Samsung's history and changes the previous small-scale acquisition style of Samsung Electronics.
Sun Yingquan, President and Chief Strategic Officer of Samsung, said that Harman's attraction to Samsung lies in the automotive Internet business, including automotive navigation services, on-board entertainment systems and automotive networking capabilities. The transaction will help Samsung Electronics enter the field of automotive electronics and develop the Internet of vehicles market.
Samsung Electronics has made many big moves in the field of automotive electronics in recent years. Before the acquisition of Harman, it established a special ADAS / automatic driving strategic business department to develop cutting-edge technologies related to vehicle networking and automatic driving. Later, it launched its own brand-new automobile chip brands - exynos auto and isocell auto.
According to wall street news, Li Zairong, vice president of Samsung Electronics, once said that the company plans to achieve a leading position in the global semiconductor industry in 2030, and lists expanding automotive chip and other businesses as a key strategy. NXP will be their best choice.
Rumor 2: lattice core will be a supplement to Samsung wafer foundry
On February 15, 2019, the Taiwan media DIGITIMES said that the lattice core may be sold and listed Korean manufacturers such as Samsung and SK Hynix as potential buyers. As soon as the news came out, it attracted global attention.
Lattice core is invested and controlled by Abu Dhabi's investment fund, UAE mbadara technology company, with a shareholding ratio of up to 90%. At the end of February 2019, CEO Li Zairong of Samsung Electronics and crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates held two meetings. It is speculated that this is a strong signal for Samsung to acquire the lattice core of the world's second-largest wafer foundry.
Samsung Electronics made a high-profile announcement in 2017 that it would scale up the OEM field, and announced that it would achieve the grand goal of achieving 25% of the modern industry market in the next five years. According to the report of Tuolong Industry Research Institute and IC insights research and adjustment organization, the market share of TSMC is as high as 56% to 60%, the grid core is about 9% to 10%, liandian is 8.5% to 9%, and Samsung is 7% to 7.5%. If Samsung acquires lattice core, the market share will immediately surpass liandian and become the second largest wafer factory in the world.
At present, Samsung wafer foundry has three plants, namely S1 plant in Giheung, South Korea, S2 plant in Austin, Texas, and S3 plant in Hwaseong, South Korea. S3 will produce 7Nm, 8nm and 10nm process chips. In February 2018, Samsung announced that the new semiconductor plant will also be completed in the second half of 2019 and officially put into operation in 2020. 7 nm and below processes will be put into operation.
In contrast, lattice core sits in 11 wafer factories around the world. Because it has abandoned the process below 7Nm, it has made great efforts in other processes. This also makes lattice core the only wafer foundry company in the world that operates 12 inch wafer factories in Asia (Singapore), Europe (Germany) and America (United States).
Although lattice core has stopped the research and development of advanced technology, according to the report of self media core thought, we can see that lattice core products are still very competitive:
Germany: Fab1, a 12 inch plant located in Dresden, is formed by the merger of Fab 36 (M1) and Fab 38 (M2), the main production plants of AMD, and CMOS is mainly based on 28nm process; At the same time, it is the main manufacturer of 22fdx process, and the new generation 12fdx process will also be mass produced here.
Singapore: located in woodlands, it is the production base of the original Chartered Semiconductor, including 8-inch wafer factories (fab2, fab3 and FAB5) and 12 inch wafer factories (fab6 and Fab7).
United States: fab8 plant in New York State, which was put into operation in 2012, has started production with 14nm advanced process; In June 2015, it acquired IBM microelectronics department and obtained 8-inch Fab 9 and 12 inch Fab 10. Fab 9 and Fab 10 obtained American military certification and are the main manufacturers of lattice core RF production.
Since its establishment in 2009, lattice core, which integrates amd manufacturing department, licensed semiconductor and IBM semiconductor business, has determined the technical development policy of FinFET and fd-soi.
Based on its own process technology capability, lattice core puts forward the development strategy of four platforms: FinFET, FDX, RF and analog mixed signal.
In terms of FinFET, due to the existence of high-performance applications, the lattice core will certainly continue to promote the development of FinFET process. The process has been promoted to 12NM to meet the needs of most customers. In the future, we will no longer pay attention to transistor miniaturization. According to the current development status of semiconductor manufacturing process, we will integrate some new features into the development, Introduce technologies such as fr technology, embedded memory and advanced three-dimensional packaging to continuously improve chip performance and meet developers' needs when transistor miniaturization is no longer sustainable.
In terms of fd-soi, 22nm fd-soi (22fdx) technology has been adopted by 55 companies worldwide, including Synaptics, Ruixin micro, Italy and France, verislicon, Arbe robotics, dream chip and riot micro, covering many fields such as IOT, industry, automotive electronics, network and mobile communication, and has won orders of more than US $2 billion. According to the company's technology development blueprint (roadmap), 12NM fd-soi process (12fdx) is being developed.
In terms of RF, lattice core follows the SiGe HP (high performance), SiGe PA (power amplifier) and RF SOI technologies pioneered by IBM and is sought after by the market. It is reported that SiGe PA shipped more than 8 billion chips and RF SOI process shipped more than 30 billion chips. The RF CMOS process of lattice core has begun to be produced by 14lpp process.
In analog mixed signal, the company will focus on HV CMOS (high voltage), envm (embedded flash memory), BCD and BCD Lite. As for the MEMS in analog mixed signal in the figure, it has been sold to world advanced (VIS).
If we acquire lattice core, Samsung Electronics will form a trend of comprehensive coverage in advanced processes. Samsung specializes in technologies below 7Nm, and lattice core focuses on deep cultivation of process nodes above 12NM. At the same time, the two can also complement each other in the two routes of FinFET and fd-soi. In the future, they will have great potential in the fields of automobile, Internet of things and 5g. Especially now that even TSMC has begun to pursue characteristic technology, lattice core may be Samsung's answer.
Samsung has more options
In addition to the above rumors about the Samsung Electronics acquisition, some South Korean analysts pointed out that Infineon and Xilinx may also become the targets of Samsung Electronics acquisition（ If you have money, you dare to think about it.)
Once in 2010, there were rumors that Samsung was interested in Infineon wireless business unit. But in the end, the Department was pocketed by Intel at a price of $1.4 billion. At that time, market observers said that even if Samsung Electronics did not eventually acquire Infineon's wireless department, Samsung Electronics would continue to seek potential M & A opportunities in new business areas such as system chips and biotechnology.
As we all know, in addition to wireless business, Infineon has made outstanding achievements in automotive electronics and power chips. If Samsung Electronics is also interested in Infineon, it may aim at Infineon's advantages in automotive electronics.
Xilinx is a well deserved leader in the field of FPGA. In recent years, Xilinx's investment in automotive electronics and artificial intelligence has also achieved a lot of results. Among them, Xilinx's FPGA autopilot solution has been adopted by many ADAS companies, including Baidu, Haikang, Qimei and other autopilot companies. In the field of automatic driving, too
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