China has charged the former chairman of chip conglomerate Tsinghua Unigroup Co (清華紫光), Zhao Weiguo (趙偉國), with crimes including corruption and illegally earning profits for his friends and family, the country’s anti-graft watchdog said in a statement yesterday.
Zhao is alleged to have handed profitable businesses to his relatives and friends to operate and purchased goods from units managed by his associates at prices higher than the market rate, the Chinese Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said.
The acts caused heavy losses to national interests, it said.
Photo: Reuters
Originating as a branch of China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, state-backed Tsinghua Unigroup emerged in the previous decade as a would-be domestic champion for China’s laggard semiconductor industry.
However, the company racked up immense debt under Zhao. It spent heavily on chip-related acquisitions, but also on unrelated, unprofitable businesses ranging from real estate to online gambling that eventually led it to default on a number of bond payments in late 2020 and face bankruptcy.
Tsinghua Unigroup last year completed a restructuring plan that placed it under the ownership of a vehicle controlled by Wise Road Capital Ltd (智路資本), Jianguang Asset Management Co (北京建廣資本) and a number of state-affiliated funds. Zhao was replaced by Li Bin (李濱) in July last year.
Financial magazine Caixin reported in the same month that Zhao had been taken away from his home Beijing by authorities and had since been out of contact.
Zhao is among the more prominent names swept up in a recent flurry of graft probes, reflecting how China’s top leadership has grown increasingly frustrated with a years-long failure to develop chips that can replace US circuitry.
The investigations sent shockwaves through an industry long accustomed to top-level support. Beijing had allocated more than US$100 billion to build up a domestic chip sector so the country could break its dependence on the West.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS