Samsung "play": first imitate the opponent and then eat the opponent

Samsung (microblogging) "playing": first imitate the opponent and then eat the opponent Taiwan's electronics industry will be Samsung as "Taiwan's public enemy", in fact, it is almost the enemy of the global electronics industry.

The South Korean electronics giant took over 30 years of glory in this field between Japanese electronics giants and established a stunning vertical integration empire.

The strong support of the South Korean government, the appreciation of the Japanese yen and the devaluation of the Korean Won are all considered to be important factors for Samsung to overtake Japanese electronics companies.

However, what is even more critical is the model dividend brought about by its unprecedented scale of highly efficient vertical integration.

Samsung was originally a good student in the Japanese industry. Since the 1960s, it has imitated the vertical integration model that Japanese companies have begun to build "whole machine + key components."

The difference is that it is ultimately more thorough and efficient.

Japanese electronics industry brands, Lin Li, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Hitachi, NEC, Sanyo and so on are different comprehensive trading companies, and the trading companies have also derived financial relations with complex bleeding relationships. Outside Japan, they often huddle, but competition in the Japanese domestic market is extremely fierce.

This makes Japan's vertical integration model is not complete, on the one hand a lot of brands, on the other hand, the vertical integration of most brands is not really fully spread, but their own selective layout, such as Sharp layout panel manufacturing, Sony, Toshiba and other layout Semiconductors.

Moreover, many of these efforts have finally failed because of mistakes in decision-making. For example, the DRAM chip business invested by Japanese companies has been reorganized several times, but it is still in trouble. Another example is Sharp, one of the most prestigious pioneers in the liquid crystal industry. In the strategy of chasing "high-generation leadership", the investment in Guishan and other factories reached 1 trillion yen, but the operating rate has not been more than 50%.

The president of the Tokyo CPI Club Social Research Institute, Hasegawa Hasegawa, said: “They (Japanese electronics companies) have invested too much and wrongly to increase their production capacity. These production capacities have become a burden for them, resulting in huge losses.”

And Samsung actually has a truly independent vertical integration kingdom, many key components, from the LCD panel to the CPU, and then to the memory chip, it can be self-sufficient.

"This makes Samsung's vertical integration more scale and efficiency." Gu Wenjun, a semiconductor analyst at Isupply (Global Electronics Industry Research Institute) said. It is worth noting that Samsung has surpassed all Japanese companies in that the dominant technology system of this generation has matured, and Japanese companies have also lost the ability to source innovative products of previous generations. Therefore, scale and efficiency have become the mainstream factors of competition among East Asian electronics companies.

At the same time, Samsung's model has really demonstrated its tremendous power. After Samsung’s own branded terminal products opened up in the world in the mid-to-late 1990s, the synchronously growing brand and its own supply chain collaborated to ensure this model. effect.

"The strong terminal brand has a significant amplification effect on Samsung's overall advantage," said a Taiwanese electronics company.

Electronic companies in Taiwan are deeply saddened by this. They first proposed the "smile curve" theory: between the design and the brand, foundry manufacturing has the lowest profits. Similar to Japan and South Korea, Taiwan’s domestic market is small, but the difference is that PC starters lack the advantages of their own brands compared to the former two.

They have also done a lot of work, but in the end they all failed. Acer (microblogging) and BenQ separated, Asustek also peeled off its OEM brand Pegatron, and so far they have not come out of a fate: Foundry and brand can not have both, all the relevant attempts have not been successful - they are from generation to generation. Starting from the start, the follow-up and then want to do the brand is difficult to eliminate the suspicion of OEM partners.

With the vertical integration model and ever-increasing scale, Samsung can even use electronics companies in Japan and Taiwan as Samsung's "reservoir": When supply chain capacity shrinks, Samsung releases a single quantity and attacks other end-brand rivals; when the industry's production capacity When it was in surplus, Samsung “opened the gate to discharge flood water” and only took orders from its own homes, throwing other key component suppliers into the heat.

In this trick, Samsung played many times. In 2008, due to the economic crisis raging, panel industry shipments shrank. Samsung TV purchased more panels from its own production, abandoned Taiwan’s panel makers, and let it struggle; when it was in 2009, Samsung suddenly went to Taiwan’s panel. The industry has thrown large orders for goods, which has caused mainland China's complete machine manufacturers to fall into the predicament of being out of stock.

Samsung has never hesitated to lose money in the field of DRAM memory chips, a huge amount of selling pressure on competitors to force a dead end, in early 2009 the original world's second largest DRAM maker Qimonda bankruptcy is related to this.

What is even more frightening is that monsters like Samsung are also extremely good at learning and are quick and quick. Last year it surpassed SMIC and ranked among the top five chip foundries in the world.

“They have a strong ability to learn and progress. They rely on their large layout, contact with various external partners, and often steal their teachers when they cooperate with outside companies. This, of course, amounts to billions of dollars and billions of dollars in huge investments each year for many years in a row. Relevant." Gu Wenjun said.

ASUS chairman Shi Chongxi described it more directly: "Samsung is good at imitating others and killing each other."

When the latecomer resides, Samsung closely follows the mobile trend. Li Na. When its Samsung has clearly appeared on the radar screen, its competitors seem to have realized it.

Following the supply of chips for the world’s best-selling smartphones and tablets two years ago, Samsung once again won an A4 processor chip designed by Apple, and is collaborating to extend the development of A5, A6 next-generation chips, even the semiconductor godfather of Taiwan. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. chairman Zhang Zhongmou has to change his attitude of despising his opponent and use "700 pound gorillas" to describe Samsung's strength.

"In the area of ​​memory chips, Samsung accounted for 40.8% of the global market share in the first quarter of this year, and 37.4% in the flash memory area. All of them are absolute scale, and sales are profitable. In addition, Samsung is in the field of foundry industry last year. Climb to fourth place.” Gu Wenjun, chief analyst at iSuppli Semiconductor, told China Business News that Samsung has gradually taken over the entire electronics industry through its efforts in memory chips and panels as well as foundries and logic chips. Industry chain.

Insiders pointed out that Samsung, which has an advantage in the upstream industry chain, is not only a “public enemy of Taiwan”, but also gradually becomes a “public enemy” of the global high-tech industry.

From zero to one, although Intel is still the leader in the semiconductor industry, the rise of Samsung has started to make new changes in the Asian chip-generation industry. According to public information, TSMC was still ranked No. 1 among the top 14 global foundry companies in 2011, earning US$ 14,600 million (equivalent to 92.9 billion yuan), and Samsung Semiconductor hitting US$ 1975 million (equivalent to US$ 12.5 billion). (Renminbi) ranks fourth. According to data from global market research institute iSuppli, Samsung’s share in the global memory chip market, memory chip market, and flash memory market is the highest in the world.

"Compared with large-scale semiconductor companies in Europe and America, through the establishment of a standard model to grasp the market, Samsung's success is to form an absolute price-performance advantage through large-scale precision manufacturing, so as to quickly seize the market, and then continue to introduce new products to maintain the leading position in the industry." Coton Core City Zhu Jizhi, executive vice president of Cogobuy, believes that Samsung's model provides an example of how the semiconductor industry can break through the success of traditional giants.

"In fact, Samsung is a high-tech company that entered later, but took the most correct strategy for competition." Gu Wenjun told reporters that at first, Samsung only made peripheral standard products such as memory chips. Continuous investment. But relying on its strong supply chain management and integration capabilities, Samsung has gradually shaken away competitors such as Qimonda and Elpida in these areas. “Samsung has entered new fields through various means such as the acquisition of IPs through mergers and acquisitions, especially when the industry is at a low tide. It is to increase investment from scratch.”

The efforts made have gradually returned in these years.

Since Samsung has established its own model from "head" to "foot", it has reduced the production cost to a certain extent and laid a good foundation for winning customers. Taking the mobile phone field as an example, Samsung not only manufactures its own mobile phones, but also designs and manufactures mobile phone chips, memory, flash memory, screens, and even mobile phone cases. In particular, core technologies such as CPUs, screens, and flash memory have their own design and production technologies, but prices But it is also cheaper than domestic manufacturers.

“In this regard, domestic manufacturers do not have any cost advantage. Compared with Samsung, the body size is like the gap between the 78 guerrillas and the whole army.” Gu Wenjun said that in the high-tech field of chips, domestic The human cost advantage is almost negligible. Some domestic manufacturers' so-called low-cost strategies are only at the expense of the supply chain's profits and the company's own company's "squeeze" after the low price, and there is no continuous competitiveness.

For price control, Zhu Jizhi gave examples to reporters. Taking the example of an MLCC capacitor that all electronic products need to use, although it is a traditional mature technology and market, Samsung has built an annual output of 7000 in just five years. The scale of 100 million pieces has become the world's largest production capacity, and the price is about 20% lower than similar products. This has had a huge impact on traditional capacitor giants such as Murata and TDK, completely changing the industry landscape.

The market for change has no eternal winner. Samsung Chairman Lee Kun Hee knows that the cruelty in the consumer electronics market is just like leveraging the rise of digital cameras in the past and seizing the opportunity for TVs to transform from vacuum tubes to flat panels. This time, he hopes Samsung will It can also grasp the rapid growth opportunities of smart phones and tablets - from the manufacture of computer chips to the manufacturing of mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads.

The recruitment trend since last year shows that Samsung intends to enter the field of server chip production. Last year, Samsung recruited Jim Mergard and Brad Burgess. The former has 16 years of working experience in AMD Semiconductor, which is the main designer of Bobcat, a low-power processor in the company.

Insiders pointed out that Samsung is replenishing technical talents in the same field and they are likely to accelerate the pace of entering the server field. This means that Samsung will compete with customers of Chaowei Semiconductor, including Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Freescale Semiconductor and Merlin Electronics. At the same time, it will also increase Samsung's competition with Intel. Intel’s revenue in semiconductors has been leading, and Samsung has ranked second in many years.

In addition, Samsung is transforming some of its memory chip production lines into logic chips, and will invest nearly $2 billion in new logic chip factories in South Korea. At present, Samsung is located in Austin, the United States, and has spent $3.6 billion on a new factory for logic chips, which has reached 40,000 wafers per month.

In fact, Samsung's layout of logic chips is not just the beginning. Gu Wenjun revealed that in many fields, Samsung has adopted the strategy of “using low-end and high-end chips for its own use” in cooperation with external chip suppliers. On the basis of continuous learning from external suppliers, after the availability of multi-core technology products and IP, we choose to enter the production and manufacturing of logic chips.

For entering the highly competitive logic chip business, Gu Wenjun thinks that Samsung has three advantages. First, Samsung itself is a huge user of a chip. Competitors TI, Qualcomm, and Intel are just chip suppliers. Samsung has its own opinions about product understanding. Secondly, in the 3D era of chips, Samsung has the advantage of memory foundry to integrate memory chips and logic chips together, and competitors' chips are relatively single. In addition, Samsung has a foundry, production capacity and supply cycle can be guaranteed, but in addition to Intel's competitors, most of the other can only give the chip to a professional foundry to produce, dependence on the foundry is too strong.

But Samsung also has its own "Achilles heel." "The logic chip changes faster and the product life cycle is shorter. Unlike memory chips, which can increase the scale through continuous investment, the requirements for product definition and software IP integration are higher. On this point, the old chip company has an advantage. Samsung may need cooperation from many companies and even the industry chain." Gu Wenjun told reporters that logic chips require the professional support of foundry manufacturers. Samsung's own foundry technology alone is not enough. After all, Samsung needs to build. It is ecosystem and cooperation.

Insiders pointed out that from the results of last year, Samsung's memory chip revenue decreased by 10% year-on-year, about 23 billion US dollars, while logic chip sales rose 70% year on year, reaching 10 billion US dollars. "Samsung's next deployment will increase investment in foundry factories and strive to produce its own memory chips and logic chips through 3D technology in the OEM process." Gu Wenjun said, in addition, Samsung is likely to be in the future Will increase development efforts in the area of ​​packaging and analog chips.