Source: Global Times

     [Ni Hao, reporter of the Global Times] Statistics released by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun on the 19th showed that 8 of the world‘s top 9 semiconductor equipment enterprises are expected to show a decline in their performance in the first quarter of 2023. The reason is that the deterioration of the semiconductor market has led to a decline in global demand, and the U.S. trade embargo on China‘s semiconductor equipment constitutes a heavy burden on these enterprises. According to the report, a total of six enterprises warned that the revenue of the first quarter of 2023 might decline year-on-year. Among them, American Applied Materials said in its performance forecast released on the 16th that the revenue growth rate in the latest financial quarter fell to the lowest level in the company‘s three and a half years. Fanlin Group estimates that the company‘s revenue in 2023 will be affected by US $2 billion to US $2.5 billion.

    According to the data of the International Semiconductor Equipment and Materials Association, the negative growth of the world semiconductor equipment market in 2023 after three years is basically a foregone conclusion. Tokyo Electronics and Fanlin Group predicted that the market of pre-process equipment, which accounts for more than half of the world‘s manufacturing equipment sales, will decrease by about 20% in 2023 compared with the previous year.

    Japanese media have noticed that most Japanese semiconductor enterprises have been negatively affected by Japan‘s following the US restrictions on exports to China. The proportion of operating revenue of Tokyo Electronics from China may fall to 22%, down about 5 percentage points year on year. At the same time, the Japanese semiconductor company Cisco, whose main business is to cut wafer processing equipment, said that although the U.S. export restrictions to China are mainly aimed at wafer front-end processing, if restricted, the company‘s production may be gradually reduced. Tokyo Precision also said that it had a premonition that half of its operating income in China would be affected.

    In the 1980s, in order to combat the development of Japan‘s semiconductor industry, the United States forced Japan to sign the US-Japan Semiconductor Agreement by means of launching the "301" investigation, making chips for bilateral negotiations through multilateral agreements, threatening to list Japan as an unfair trading country, and imposing retaliatory tariffs, which led to the almost complete withdrawal of Japanese semiconductor enterprises from global competition, and the market share fell from 50% to 10%. At the same time, with the support of the US government, a large number of US semiconductor enterprises seized the opportunity to seize the market.

    On February 10, Mao Ning, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, said that in recent years, the threshold for the abuse of "long-arm jurisdiction" by the United States has been continuously lowered. This practice has seriously damaged the principle of sovereign equality of States, eroded the multilateral international order with the United Nations as the core, distorted normal international trade, and greatly damaged the interests of enterprises of all countries.