The huge conference room of the Kerry Hotel, attached to the new Shanghai International Exhibition Center, is full to listen to the “Innovation and Investment” conference of the 2021 edition of Semicon China. “We must thank Trump! dares Wang Xinchao, CEO of Jiangsu Xinchao Technology Group and investor. Until now, it was very difficult to develop the semiconductor industry in China: companies preferred to import technologies from abroad. But, thanks to Trump, there is now a consensus between industry and government, and this is where we must invest because developing our production of chips is crucial for our independence. We import 350 billion dollars in chips a year! If we could replace them with Chinese technology, it would be a huge market! ” The public is won over.
The crowded aisles of the exhibition, which spans 84,500 square meters and brings together 1,100 exhibitors, bear witness to the effervescence of the semiconductor industry in China. Faced with American sanctions which threaten the access of certain Chinese companies to these key technologies, China is seeking at all costs to ensure the development of its own industry. Replacing foreign electronic chips with Chinese technology is no longer an industrial objective among others, it is a question of survival for a part of Chinese electronics at the mercy of Washington’s sanctions.
“A skyscraper built on sand”
Huawei, the world’s number one in telecommunications equipment, and the world’s short-lived number two in smartphone sales, has had a bitter experience. Placed on the blacklist of the US Department of Commerce in 2019, this Chinese flagship of innovation is deprived of access to US technologies, software and components and, since the summer of 2020, to all foreign chipmakers. At the end of 2020, the company saw its sales of smartphones and, for the first time since the company published its results, its turnover plummeted, suddenly revealing a structural fragility of China. This country, which unquestionably dominates the production of electronic equipment, is “A skyscraper built on sand”, recognized, in 2019, Pony Ma, the boss of Tencent, giant of social networks in China. Washington has since blacklisted dozens of other Chinese companies, from surveillance to chip production to artificial intelligence. The Biden administration does not seem determined to lower the pressure.
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