The data in the first quarter of this year showed that China’s chip imports fell by 22.9%, and the chip import value dropped by 26.7%, showing that not only the number of chips imported by China is declining, but also the price of imported chips has also fallen, which can be called volume price. All fell, and under such circumstances, it caused a huge blow to American chips.
China is the world's largest chip importer. In 2022, China will purchase nearly 70% of the global chip market. China has significantly reduced chip imports, which has dealt a blow to the US chip market, which dominates the global chip market. US chips account for nearly 50% of the global chip market. share.
In the first quarter, U.S. chips announced their performance one after another. The performance of Intel and Qualcomm dropped by 40% and 18% respectively. Intel is the chip leader in the United States, and has been the global chip hegemony for more than 20 years. However, it has been surpassed by Samsung from time to time in recent years. Since 2022, it has suffered losses for two consecutive quarters.
The American chip company that is worse than Intel is Micron. In Q4 of 2022, Micron made a loss for the first time. In the first quarter of this year, its revenue plummeted by 53%, and its loss was as high as 2.31 billion US dollars, which was more than ten times larger than the loss in Q4 of 2022. In the face of dismal performance, Micron plans to further lay off employees, and the number of layoffs may reach 15%.
Micron is precisely the first company among American chip companies to take action against Chinese technology companies. Chip companies only rank third in the global memory chip industry, and it is their own fault for encountering such a predicament.
Micron is in such a predicament because Chinese chips have successfully developed memory chips. In the past two years, China’s memory chip production capacity has been greatly expanded. It is expected that after the second phase of mass production, China’s memory chip production capacity will double again. The global memory chip industry has brought about dramatic changes.
Since the middle of last year, the price of global memory chips has almost halved, and the current price of the memory chip industry continues to fall. Under the competition of Chinese memory chips, Korean memory chips, which have surged in inventory, have chosen to follow up. Recently, South Korea’s Samsung has greatly reduced the price of SSD solid state drives. The price of Samsung’s SSD solid state drives is even lower than that of Chinese chips, while Micron has It no longer has the ability to fight price wars, and perhaps after this war, Micron will completely decline.
China also launched an investigation into Micron, which can be said to be the last straw for Micron. With the example of Micron, some chip companies in the United States have recognized the importance of the Chinese market and have chosen to compromise in order to survive. Among them, NVIDIA is the first American chip company to choose to compromise. NVIDIA has customized the high-end chip A800 for the Chinese market in Q3 last year. Recently, NVIDIA has customized the high-end chip H800 for the Chinese market.
As NVIDIA made a choice, Intel also made a similar choice this year. Intel customized related chips for China with the latest 13th generation Core i5 and i7 processors, improved the cache, and the price is more expensive than the European and American markets. Low; then AMD chose to follow up, and AMD will sell some chips in the Chinese market with a 40% discount.
Obviously, these American chip companies are now deeply aware of the importance of the Chinese market. In the case of continuous decline in performance, in order to survive, these American chip companies have expressed their goodwill to the Chinese market in order to strive to continue to obtain income from the Chinese market, so as to avoid being in the Chinese market. This round of chip down cycle was eliminated.