KUALA LUMPUR (Jan 11): China’s semiconductor industry registered an annual growth rate of 30.6% in 2020 to reach US$39.8 billion in total sales.

The US-based Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) in a blog post on Monday (Jan 10) said the jump in growth helped China capture 9% of the global semiconductor market in 2020, surpassing Taiwan for two consecutive years and closely following Japan and the EU, which each took 10% of market share.

It said sales data for 2021 are not yet available.

SIA said just five years ago, China’s semiconductor device sales were US$13 billion, accounting for only 3.8% of global chip sales

It said if China’s semiconductor development continues its strong momentum — maintaining 30% CAGR over the next three years — and assuming growth rates of industries in other countries stay the same, the Chinese semiconductor industry could generate US$116 billion in annual revenue by 2024, capturing upwards of 17.4% of global market share.

It said this would place China behind only the United States and South Korea in global market share.

SIA said equally startling is the number of new firms in China rushing into the semiconductor industry.

It said nearly 15,000 Chinese firms registered as semiconductor enterprises in 2020.

The association said a large number of these new firms are fabless start-ups specialising in GPU, EDA, FPGA, AI computing, and other higher-end chip design.

It said many of these firms are developing advanced chips, designing and taping out devices on bleeding-edge process nodes.

Sales of Chinese high-end logic devices are also accelerating, with the combined revenue of China’s CPU, GPU, and FPGA sectors growing at an annual rate of 128% to nearly US$1 billion in revenue in 2020, up from a meagre US$60 million in 2015