"When verification was completed in the past year or two, the majority of local chipmakers largely switched to producing chips on domestically made silicon wafers. The shift is quite significant," said one executive with direct knowledge of the situation. "Regardless if you are a Chinese supplier of driver chips or not, if you want China's business, it is strongly 'encouraged' to use Chinese-made wafers," an executive with a display and semiconductor equipment manufacturer told Nikkei Asia. "This is also the way China's self-sufficiency policy can sustain itself."
David Dai, a veteran semiconductor analyst at Bernstein Research, said China's pace of achieving self-sufficiency in silicon wafers is picking up faster than many outsiders had expected, especially for more mature, or older generation, chips. "Global market leaders' share in China is bound to decline. The country's self-sufficiency in 12-inch wafers has already reached more than 50% when looking only at supplies to local Chinese chipmakers and excluding foreign chipmakers, such as Samsung, TSMC or SK Hynix, that operate plants in China," Dai said. "For 8-inch wafers, self-sufficiency rates are already 80%. In memory chipmaking cases, the percentage is even higher."