Consumer electronics

From 2010 to 2021, China's consumer electronics industry has developed rapidly, and many chip companies have been achieved by the wave of The Times. When smart phones, mobile power supplies, gallium nitride fast charge, TWS real wireless headphones, smart wear and other tuyere emerge, many semiconductor chip companies have also successfully seized the opportunities of The Times. Whether it is mobile phones, tablets, set-top boxes or smart wearable devices will use a large number of consumer electronics chips. Consumer electronics chips in the development stage will consider the performance, power consumption and cost of three dimensions. The strong and weak chip performance in the era of smart phones has become an important standard to evaluate the merits of a model, whether it is the black King of Glory, or eat chicken and peace elite can use a stronger CPU chip to bring the ultimate game feeling. Taking Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chip as an example, using 1*Cortex-A77 (2.84GHz) +3* Cortex-A77 (2.42GHz) +4*Cortex-A55 (1.8GHz) architecture, NPU can achieve 15 trillion times/second computing energy: ISP speeds have reached a processing speed of 2 billion pixels per second, which can support 200 million pixel cameras. When billions of transistors on a chip work at high frequency, a large number of dynamic power consumption, short circuit power consumption and leakage power consumption will be generated, if not controlled, not only the results of calculation errors will occur, and even some links in the circuit will be fused together and make the chip unrepairable. Therefore, in addition to the pursuit of performance, consumer electronics should also take into account the power consumption problem, otherwise it is easy to appear the fuselage hot, standby time reduction, use experience decline and other problems. As chip performance becomes more powerful, chip prices continue to rise, accounting for an increasing share of the total cost of mobile phones. Taking Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 as an example, the cost is about 700 yuan, accounting for the cost ratio of the models that are equipped with Xiaomi 10pro accounted for 14%, Redmi K30pro accounted for 23%, OPPO findX2pro accounted for 10%, and Samsung S2ultra accounted for 7%; The Kirin 990 costs about 500 yuan, accounting for about 16% of the price of Huawei's nova6, 10% of the price of the P40, 7% of the price of the P40 PRO, and 5% of the price of the P40 pro plus. The price of the Mediatek Tianguet 1000 is 280 yuan, about 9.8% of the price of the OPPO Reno3; Therefore, whether it is from the perspective of improving the competitiveness of products or improving corporate profits, it is necessary to control the cost of chips. When making chips, reducing the distance between the circuits inside the chip can cram fewer transistors onto fewer chips, making them more efficient and reducing power consumption. Therefore, from the early micron to the late nano chip, the process size is very important. At present, the mobile phone chip process has developed from the earlier 90 nm, to the later 65 nm, 45 nm, 32 nm, 28 nm, 16 nm, 12 nm, 7 nm, and has been developed to the latest 5 nm. The process size of mobile phone chips is moving towards 1 nanometer. With the development of consumer electronics, consumer electronics chips will become more and more advanced in the future.

     In 2020-2022, affected by the epidemic, the supply chain of the consumer electronics chip industry has been disrupted, and the price of consumer electronics chips has skyrocketed, and now, there is a scenario of price reduction in the consumer electronics chip market. According to CCTV financial news, in 2022, affected by the decline in global mobile phone sales, resulting in an oversupply of mobile phone electronic chips, major mobile phone manufacturers have lowered their shipment targets, and cut orders to upstream chip manufacturers, and the market price of consumer electronics control chips has continued to fall, from a high of 100 yuan to double digits. Taking a certain ST chip as an example, the market offer once rose to about 3,500 yuan in 2021, and fell to 600 yuan in 2022, with a price reduction of more than 80%; Another type of chip, the price of which will remain at about 200 yuan in 2021, currently sells for only about 20 yuan each, only one-tenth of the highest price. According to Qualcomm's financial report released on Wednesday local time, as of June 25, the third fiscal quarter of 2023, their revenue in the United States general accounting standards of $8.451 billion, less than the same period of the last fiscal year of $10.936 billion, a year-on-year decline of 23%; Net profit of $1.803 billion, down 52% from a year earlier; Earnings per share were $1.60, down 51% from a year earlier. Qualcomm expects handset sales to fall at least a high single-digit percentage this year, which it attributes to a weak global economy. Against this backdrop, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said in a conference call with analysts that the company will further cut costs. The company said in a regulatory filing that one of the main ways it will cut costs is through layoffs, but did not specify how many jobs would be affected. Qualcomm, which had about 51,000 employees as of last September, has previously cut jobs during the economic downturn. Mediatek, a major maker of mobile phone chips, has also been affected by the market downturn. Mediatek reported revenues of T $98.1 billion in the second quarter, down 37 per cent from a year earlier and up 2.6 per cent from the previous quarter. Net profit was NT $16bn, down 55 per cent from a year earlier and 5.2 per cent from the previous quarter. Consolidated gross margin for the second quarter was 47.5%. In the first half of 2023, Mediatek achieved revenue of NT $193.8 billion, down 35% year-on-year.

       In the consumer electronics chip market, the PC chip market appears to be recovering. On August 1, 2023, AMD announced the second quarter earnings report, and the PC chip division revenue was $998 million, an increase of 35% from the previous quarter. While the division's second-quarter revenue fell sharply from a year earlier, the decline was slower than in the first quarter (down 54 per cent in the second quarter and 65.2 per cent in the first quarter) and above estimates of $841 million. AMD said the year-over-year decline in the business stemmed from lower processor shipments due to a weak PC market and significant inventory adjustments across the PC supply chain. At the same time, AMD mentioned that the PC chip division's revenue surge was due to the surge in Ryzen 7000 series processor sales and the improvement of the PC market environment. According to data released by Canalys in July, the global PC market shipped 62.1 million units in the second quarter of 2023, down 11.5% year on year, which has narrowed from the decline of more than 30% in the previous two quarters. The agency judged that the PC market has shown early signs of bottoming out, and IT is expected that companies will resume long-delayed investment in IT upgrades. However, due to the economic downturn, consumers remain cautious in PC purchases, so shipments in 2023 will still be lower than in 2022. Counterpoint, another market research institute, believes that due to the lack of stable growth drivers, a moderate recovery is expected in the second half of 2023. In addition to AMD, Intel is also optimistic about the PC market. Intel CEO Kissinger judged in the earnings conference that with inventory returning to normal, the PC market will continue to recover in the second half of the year. Kissinger also said he is optimistic about the future of personal computers because households in most regions are growing steadily and use of PCS is still higher than pre-pandemic levels.