Recently, SMIC announced that it will achieve mass production in the 14nm process in the first half of next year. SMIC is accelerating its development.
According to SMIC, currently, in China, 70% of design companies are willing to choose SMIC as their preferred foundry partner. Since 2018, SMIC's sales in China accounted for more than 50% of its total sales. Among its top 10 customers, there are 4 Chinese customers, 4 North American customers and 2 Eurasia customers. Sales of communications and consumer electronics applications accounted for more than 80%.
At present, the development of SMIC faces challenges such as competition, cost, process technology bottleneck and talent shortage. In recent years, SMIC has continuously optimized its team in terms of talents by introducing industry talents. At present, SMIC has a total of 17,800 employees, nearly 550 foreign employees, and a senior research and development team of about 2,000 people and a number of experts. These are one of the important reasons for their accelerated development.
According to reports, SMIC's monthly production capacity has increased by nearly 160,000 in the past three years, an increase of 64%. In 2017, R&D investment exceeded US$500 million, accounting for 17% of sales, and capital expenditure was approximately US$2.5 billion. Among the total sales of technology nodes, 150nm and 180nm accounted for 37.1%, 55nm and 65nm accounted for 24.2%, and 40nm and 45nm accounted for 17.5%. These three contributions accounted for more than 78% of the revenue share.
