The long-time rumored state-level integrated circuit (commonly known as chips) industrial investment fund was finally officially established, which will open the curtain of large investment in domestic chip industry.On October 14th, the MIIT office issued a message, declaring the official foundation of the national integrated circuit industry investment fund on September 24th, and it also revealed that this fund will adopt a company system form.
The investments of this established fund will focus on the IC chips manufacturing, as well as chip design, package and testing, equipment and materials and so on, it will carry out market-oriented operation and professional management.
In the list of the promoters, there are CDB Capital, China Tobacco, E-town Capital, China Mobile, Guosheng Group, China Electric Power Research Institute, Tsinhua Unigroup and Huaxin Investment Management, many of which are large state-owned enterprises.
According to the plan, it will attract more large enterprises, financial institutions and social capital in the future, jointly setting up the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Co., Ltd. Although it doesn’t reveal the size of the fund, investment and exit ways and other important information, the establishment of such a fund has already showed the government attach importance to the chip industry, and it is definitely good for the entire chip industry.
As informed resources have revealed, after complete registrations of the company, the first batch of funds scale may not exceed CNY 10 billion, but added with the subsequent rounds of financing investment, the size of the fund will reach CNY 120 billion, of which the main funding will come from the Ministry of finance.
Over the past ten years, the government has launched policies to support chip industry in different periods. Although it has obtained considerable development, but it still fell behind relatively, as a result, we still need to import large quantities of related products from abroad. According to the data that the General Administration of Customs revealed in January, the imported CI chips amounted to $232.2 billion in 2013, exceeding the $219.6 imports of crude oil. Because the core components of information products are still imported extensively, it threatens the national information security in a certain extent.
At present, in the chip manufacturing field, domestic enterprises are far behind foreign ones. In domestic, the main chip manufacturing enterprises still use the 45-nm process technology, and the most advanced 28-nm process technology in SMIC has just entered the track. But in contrast, Intel, TSMC and other enterprises have entered the 16-nm process.
As the insiders see it, the cause of the falling behind of domestic chip manufacturing enterprises is lack of capital investment. According to the data from Operation monitoring and Coordination Bureau of MIIT, during the six years from 2008 to 2013, the total fixed-asset investment in our IC industry is only $40 billion, while the investment of Intel alone reached $13 billion in 2013.
Although the over CNY 100 billion scale of state funds is not big for the chip industry, but the establishment of such a fund from the national level can deliver the confidence that the government has in supporting chip industry, and more preferential policies would be brought.