When Donald Trump first became president of the United States, he focused his high-tech sanctions on individual Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE. His successor, Joseph Biden, introduced industry-wide restrictions. One way or another, in China, over the period from 2019 to 2023, more than 22,000 companies in the semiconductor sector left the market.
Image Source: SMIC
Taiwanese media reported this with reference to TMTPost. The majority of Chinese companies that left due to US sanctions could not boast of the scale of their business, which means they did not have any unique technologies to ensure the survivability of the company, and also could not qualify for significant government support measures, unlike the giants of national industry that were in front of everyone. Adding to the problems was the outflow of foreign investors from the Chinese stock market, which limited the sources of capital for Chinese companies.
In passing, it is noted that in the first seven months of this year, China spent $212 billion on the purchase of chips outside the country, but sold only $90 billion worth of chips for export. In fact, a foreign trade deficit arose in this area, and even this indicator does not allow us to talk about self-sufficiency China in the field of chip production. In quantitative terms, imports of chips at the end of the period increased by 14.5% to 308.1 billion units. In monetary terms, it grew by 11.5% compared to the same period last year. Exports at the same time increased by 10.3% to 166.6 billion chips, in monetary terms the increase reached 22.5%.