Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) shares rallied nearly 4 percent during early trading yesterday amid optimism that the nation’s biggest DRAM chipmaker would benefit from China’s latest ban on purchasing memory chips from Micron Technology Inc.
The restrictions are widely considered a result of an escalating technology dispute between the US and China.
Chinese firms might shift orders to non-US suppliers such as Nanya Technology and South Korean memory chipmakers Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc.
Photo: Grace Hung, Taipei Times
The Cyberspace Administration of China on Sunday night said that its review found that Micron’s memory chips pose serious network security risks to the country’s critical infrastructure supply chains, affecting China’s national security, the agency said in a statement on its Web site.
To safeguard its national security, Beijing said China’s major information and infrastructure operators should stop buying Micron products.
Chinese companies would be barred from using Micron’s memory chips in servers and data centers, it said.
“Based on our observation, about 10 percent of Micron’s revenue will be affected, if Micron lost all orders of DRAM and NAND memory chips for networking, servers and cloud devices, as well as all local government clients,” Taipei-based market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said in an e-mail.
“Overall, the restrictions will not lead to any major changes in the landscape of the world’s memory chip industry. It will not alter the current supply-demand dynamics,” TrendForce said. “Production in China accounts for only a small portion of Micron’s total production. Chinese business also makes up a minor part.”
If Micron’s Chinese clients turn to non-US memory chip suppliers to make up for the shortfall, the cut for each supplier would be minimal, given the small pie, TrendForce said.
“We do not expect any drastic changes to happen to the memory chip industry,” it said.
Nanya Technology makes about 60 to 70 percent of its revenue from DRAM chips used in consumer electronics such as televisions, set-top boxes, network devices and vehicles.
Nanya Technology is relatively new to the server DRAM chip business, which only constituted 6 to 8 percent of its revenue last quarter.
Shares of Nanya Technology closed up 0.29 percent at NT$70.10 in Taipei trading yesterday, while shares of Powertech Technology Inc (力成科技), which provides memory chip testing and packaging services in China for Micron, dipped 1.15 percent to NT$94.90.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness