————————————————————————————————————(ChinaIT.com News) After 2020, the chip industry has entered an extremely magical new era. Almost overnight, the chip has become a sought-after product among multiple industries.
In September of this year, a Bosch ESP chip used in the electronic stabilization system of the car body skyrocketed from 13 yuan to 4,000 yuan.It is reported that a new car manufacturer in order to purchase thousands of electronic parking(EPR)Chips have to be offered 800 times the price on the black market.
It’s not just industries such as automobiles and mobile phones that are affected by the lack of cores. A report released by Goldman Sachs in June this year showed that 169 industries have been hit by the lack of core.
It is worth noting that the lack of core tide has yet to ease any trend. At present, the industry generally believes that this round of core shortage will continue at least until 2022.
At a time when the lack of cores is raging, chip practitioners are also looking for new wealth codes. In Huaqiangbei, countless speculators shuttled between stalls, repeating the story of getting rich overnight or betting away.
At the same time, other chip players are looking for new opportunities in the spot chip market to build a trading platform that can benefit both suppliers and demanders. In the eyes of some chip demanders, middlemen in the chip market have become the last straw.
1. Intensified core shortage
Since the second half of 2020, the key word that has received the most attention in the chip market has been “core shortage”. As of today, the lack of core tide has not shown any signs of relief. Instead, it got worse. The reason behind the lack of core tide is not complicated, and can roughly be broken down into two levels of supply and demand.
On the supply side, chip production, as a cutting-edge manufacturing industry, has extremely high requirements for the stability of the production process. After the epidemic, the endless black swan incidents have made chip shipments no longer stable.
For example, in August this year, the Bosch supplier and the Muar factory in Malaysia were forced to suspend operations due to the epidemic. “More than 3,000 employees sacrificed more than 20 due to the disease, and hundreds of them were infected.” Xu Daquan, vice president of Bosch China, wrote in Moments of Friends. This is also the direct cause of the soaring Bosch ESP chip mentioned earlier.
Domestic chip manufacturers have also encountered similar incidents. For example, in June of this year, Taiwan’s semiconductor packaging and testing plant KYEC had a new crown group infection. Some employees of the company stopped work for 14 days. The monthly production capacity is estimated to drop by 30% to 35%.
On the demand side, the superposition of multiple factors has also exacerbated the outbreak of core shortages.
For example, the rapid growth of the new energy automobile market has increased the demand for chips in the automotive industry; the “mining” army brought about by the rise in digital currency prices has also squeezed a large amount of chip production capacity; consumer electronic products such as cameras and game consoles have been in the past two years. Entering the replacement period, intensified the shortage of chip supply. In the end, the tide of the Internet of Things, the Industrial Internet, and the digital transformation of enterprises has once again made chips a sought-after product.
In this context, an area that was rarely paid attention to in the past-the chip open market, has grown rapidly in a short period of time. Car companies and other chip demanders who are plagued by the lack of core tide have poured in to find sources of chips in this market. The new and old players in the chip industry are naturally unwilling to be lonely. In this magical market, getting rich overnight or going bankrupt overnight is not a myth.
2. The chip open market enters the field of vision
Under the background of the lack of core, the market structure of the chip industry is undergoing subtle changes.
During the stable period of the industry, chip demanders often order chips directly from chip manufacturers and various distributors and agents. When the tide of core shortages arrives, the open spot trading model of “paying with one hand and delivering with one hand” will rise strongly.
Since then, chips have been in short supply. Especially in industries such as automobiles, automakers generally purchase chips through suppliers, rather than ordering chips themselves. But once there is a shortage of cores, suppliers cannot deliver chips on time, and automakers must find their own way out.
They began to turn their attention to the open spot market, looking for spot chips in the hands of various chip agents, suppliers, and traders. At the same time, the “dumb stuff” in the various industrial chain links of the chip industry chain(Ie stock chip)It was also “activated” and began to circulate in the market.
The popularity of the open spot market for chips has naturally spawned new demand for chip transactions. Compared with the traditional chip market, the chip market has a higher probability of problematic chips and incorrect products, and chip buyers often need to inspect the goods. More importantly, chips are a market with at least tens of millions of SKUs, and it is not easy to match buyers and sellers.
In this context, a number of trading platforms have emerged in the open chip market, providing related services such as information release, transaction matching, inspection and delivery for both parties to the transaction. “Chip Superman” is one of them.
On the Chip Superman platform, the platform will provide chip trading and solution docking for both parties to the transaction. Before the transaction, the platform will help users to provide quality; in the transaction link, the platform will provide services such as standard inspection and payment guarantee.
The founder of Chip Superman, Jiang Lei, graduated from the Department of Electronics of Nanjing University and has more than ten years of experience in chip procurement and distribution. In Jiang Lei’s view, when chip shortages have become the norm for a period of time, car companies and any chip demand side may encounter constraints in the chip supply chain. Some investors will even find chip superman to find sources of chips for the companies they invest in.
Compared with chip design, manufacturing, packaging and production supporting companies with higher technological thresholds, chip agents, distributors, and traders are the foundation for many domestic chip companies to start. “Back then, we dealt with chips from Europe, the United States, Japan, and South Korea every day, and domestic chips accounted for only single digits in the global market. Now, those Chinese chip companies that started as chip distributors and even borrowed money to survive have already Grow into a listed company with a market value of 100 billion yuan.” Jiang Lei said.
She also predicted the future of the chip market on her public account “Xinshixiang”: “To counterattack the top-down seller’s market in Europe and America, establish a new circulation ecology, and establish a free alliance of electronic information industry people.” Interesting Yes, this has also become one of the goals of Chip Superman.
At the end of 2017, Chip Superman received angel investment from Plum Angel Ventures and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and completed the Pre-A round of financing invested by Dark Horse Fund and TusStar in 2018. Currently, Chip Superman has launched a new round of financing and plans to introduce more investment institutions.
3. The new model in the post-core shortage era
Under the tide of core shortage, a large number of middlemen have emerged in the chip industry. And what is the competitiveness of chip superman?
In the chip trading market, Chip Superman is an atypical existence. Unlike most chip dealers who rely on telephone sales and sweeping houses to acquire customers, Chip Superman has a lower cost way to acquire customers.
The origin of Chip Superman comes from a vertical official account in the chip industry. At the beginning of 2017, Jiang Lei began to publish chip industry articles on the “Xinshixiang” public account under the pseudonym “Sister Hua”, and accumulated a large number of vertical users in the chip industry.
In the process, Jiang Lei began to meet more and more players who wanted to buy or sell chips. Since then, she has launched the “Chip Superman” brand and began to provide trading platform services for the supply and demand sides of the chip market.
Through official accounts, video accounts, live broadcasts, offline classrooms and other products, Superman has established a product matrix with extremely low customer acquisition costs, and has established its own brand awareness in the chip industry.
Today, with this methodology of content creation, attracting customers, and business transformation, Superman has achieved an average annual growth of 300% since 2017. According to Jiang Lei, Chip Superman has achieved revenues of over 100 million in the first half of this year and has already made full profits.
However, in the chip industry, the chip superhumans have always been unable to escape a soul torture-when the lack of core tide ends, where will the trading platforms of the chip open market go?
In this regard, Jiang Lei’s answer is that Superman has found the “blue ocean of new demand” in the chip market in a sense.In her eyes, the demand side of the chip market has undergone significant changes-chip demand has broken the circle, and there are more and more emerging customer groups. These new customers are more inclined to work on “out-of-circle platforms” such as Superman. Looking for solutions and chip sources.And this is the future opportunity of Chip Superman.
With the gradual improvement of information infrastructure such as communications, power and cloud computing centers, the new generation of technological innovation cycle has been fully opened. Since 2020, the lack of cores in automobiles and the lack of MCU chips for the Internet of Everything are essentially the inevitable emergence of new applications, and the continuous break-through of the demand for chips is inevitable. And these new customers who broke the circle will naturally look for suppliers who are out of the circle like Superman.
Today, integrated circuits have been written into the “Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China and Outline of Long-Term Goals for 2035”. In the future, the overall market scale of the chip industry will continue to expand.
The supply and demand structure of chip companies may also undergo new changes. Chip channel brands with more resources can also submit customized chip production requirements to upstream fabs and design houses according to customer needs. This is also a future opportunity for chip superhumans.
Currently, Jiang Lei is planning the further upgrade of Chip Superman. For example, it will focus on overseas markets and upgrade the products and services of Superman, so that the trading platform of Superman has more standardized service capabilities. At the same time, Jiang Lei is also advancing a new round of financing for Chip Superman.
Right now, Chip Superman’s goal is to achieve a wide-ranging layout in the chip industry and do a good job in water delivery services. In the future, Chip Superman’s vision is to be the “smart router” of China’s chip industry, connecting upstream and downstream users in the industry as a node-type enterprise, and helping them achieve industrial upgrading and digital transformation.
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