Since 2011, the world’s major wafer foundries are accelerating the expansion of advanced process capacity scale. With the flourish of smart phone and tablet PC market, the demand for advance process which owns low cost and high efficiency increased rapidly, therefore, the wafer foundries including TSMC, UMC, Global Foundries and Samsung have expanded production capacity actively.
In 2011, the annual output value of global semiconductor foundries was nearly $ 30 billion, and TSMC occupies more than 40% of the market share. With the flourish of UMC, Samsung, Intel and GlobalFoundries, in order to maintain the leading position, TSMC invested $ 5.9 billion to expand 12-inch plant and improve the production capacities of 65/55 nm and 40 nm, and the capital expenditure amounted to $ 7.8 billion in 2011, mainly invested in Wafer Fifteenth Factory. In 2012, the capital expenditure is expected to reach $8-8.5 billion.
In 2011, UMC gained 35.7% stock equity of HeJian Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd and became its largest shareholder. In the future, UMC will continue to negotiate the acquisition of stock equity with other shareholders so as to accelerate the production capacity expansion, and also to improve the competitiveness by virtue of capacity advantage complement between China Mainland and Taiwan; at the same time, UMC began 28 nm pilot production since the first quarter of 2012, it is estimated that by the end of 2012, the revenue of 28 nm will occupy 5% of the total revenue, and the capital expenditure plan is $ 2 billion in 2012.
The global market share of China mainland’s wafer foundries reached 13.3% in 2006. However, this proportion decreased year by year, and the global market share dropped to 10% and less than 9% in 2010 and 2011 respectively.