In 2015, a wave of panic swept through the global semiconductor industry. According to statistics, agreed on mergers and acquisitions has a market value of nearly $160 billion, more than $100 billion project has been completed mergers and acquisitions. This amount is the largest in the history of the semiconductor industry more than six times the annual amount of mergers and acquisitions.
For many, this integration is very natural, after all, the semiconductor industry has more than 60 years of development history, has been a very mature industry, its growth rate is slowing down.
Discretization of the semiconductor
Historically, the semiconductor industry is an important trend of the development of discretization. In 1966, Texas instruments, Fairchild, and MOTOROLA, the three companies accounted for about 70% of the semiconductor industry revenues. By 1972, the three companies market share has been decreased obviously. Today's biggest semiconductor company, Intel, about 15% of the market share, but this is just the number one cause of 1972 Texas instruments more than 2%.
In the past 40 years, the world's five biggest semiconductor company comprehensive market share remained stable, the same situation applies to top 10 companies. The combined market share of the top 50 semiconductor company has gradually reduce, fell by 10% in ten years.
Hasn't seen for years developed in 2015, the combined market share of the top 10 semiconductor company over the past few decades for the first time in the peak (1984), while only 2.5% higher. This is largely caused by sudden combined by several companies.
Moore's law
Unlike most of the industry, semiconductor industry driven by Moore's law, namely every 18 months, integrated circuit will double the number transistor, prompting the semiconductor industry leader team constantly changing. The top ten semiconductor companies change constantly, in the past 50 years, in the industry's top 10 more than 50% of the company has disappeared from the list.
The top 10 manufacturers constantly change? Each of the past 10 years, were dominated by constantly updating the semiconductor technology. In the 1950 s is replaced by the manufacturer of silicon transistor germanium transistors made 10 years; In the 1960 s, powered by bipolar integrated circuits; In the 1970 s is the MOS memory; In the 1980 s is the MOS microprocessors; In the 1990 s is integrated with embedded microcontroller processor SoC; In recent years is the wireless communication and no fabs semiconductor company. Every 10 years is lead by the leading technical innovation of the new company. Therefore, the heroes of the past few decades gradually fade out, until they dropped out of the top 10.
Integration of driving force is different
In 2015, with the emergence of m&a frenzy, the semiconductor industry has entered a unprecedented period. After 60 years of "discretization" development, the industry took the first step in the development in the direction of integration. For many people, this is a sign that the industry matures, because its growth rate has slowed, to further improve the return on investment, will depend on the integration of economies of scale, not natural growth.
Driving force of the mergers and acquisitions often comes from the acquired through economies of scale to maximize efficiency. In most industries, the economies of scale in manufacturing is one of the most important, this rule especially true for integrated device manufacturer (IDM). IDM mode in the past few decades, however, the shrinking of the semiconductor industry, replaced by a handful of IDM oligarchs, such as Intel and samsung, and memory, as well as the production of analog, mixed signal and RF and power semiconductor manufacturing differentiation.
At present, the semiconductor industry from no fabs occupy 30% of the market. Produced by no wafer company merger scale is limited. If two large semiconductor companies merge, they from wafer manufacturers get economies of scale, encapsulation and test vendor discount not much difference. Achieve economies of scale, it seems, is not the main motivations of mergers and acquisitions, as a result, when the industry reached a certain maturity, semiconductor companies rarely by expanding economic scale to achieve high profit margins. In the wireless industry, for example, in recent 10 years, the majority of mobile phone baseband chip market leader closed their business, rather than bringing them to market in the form of mergers and acquisitions. Texas instruments, broadcom, Marvell and ST company, have been baseband chip market leader, without exception, they found no flange of the baseband chip business buyers.
The real reason is that we are in the semiconductor industry growth periods of key fluctuations. Mobile phone promoted the recent wave of growth, the semiconductor industry needs a new growth drivers, such as the Internet of things. Throughout history, every time a new application, the semiconductor industry will appear explosive growth. In recent years, the cost of a single semiconductor transistor fell more than 30% per year on average, over the past 60 years, the future will remain the same development trend, it will also promote semiconductor emerging wave of application in the market development in the future.
