Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 180 Acquisition of a Wafer Factory

Jiangcheng Semiconductor is one of the few 12-inch wafer fabs in China, but due to insufficient operating rate for a long time after its completion, it has suffered huge losses and urgently needs to introduce external forces to turn things around.

There was foreign investment involved before, but later it was rejected due to strategic security considerations. Now Zhiyun Semiconductor and SMIC are competing for this project.

As for the 12-inch wafer fab, both Zhiyun Semiconductor and SMIC are coveting it, but SMIC is just a pure foundry. They themselves are in trouble and have no money to invest in it.

Unlike Zhiyun Semiconductor, it is not short of money. The most important thing is not just acquisitions, but also subsequent investments. Moreover, Zhiyun Semiconductor is backed by two major consumer electronics terminal manufacturers, Zhiyun Technology and Weiku Electronics, and has various chip orders!

Therefore, after a series of preliminary negotiations, it has been preliminarily decided that Zhiyun Semiconductor will acquire Jiangcheng Semiconductor.

This will be an acquisition and subsequent investment involving an amount of more than 2 billion US dollars...

Not only Zhiyun Technology attaches importance to it, but Jiangcheng Semiconductor actually attaches even more importance to it.

Against this background, Xu Shenxue and his delegation arrived in Jiangcheng on his company's business jet and received a warm welcome.

The world's richest man is coming with an investment of at least 2 billion US dollars and a huge order. We have to take it seriously!
Not to mention, Zhiyun Technology has already established a research and development center in Jiangcheng.

After getting off the plane, the convoy went directly to Zhiyun Technology's Jiangcheng branch.

Relying on the rich and high-quality local educational resources, Zhiyun Technology's Jiangcheng branch has established a large-scale R&D center, which currently has more than 2,000 employees of various types.

Among Zhiyun Technology’s many R&D centers, this is one of the more important ones.

Zhiyun Technology has many R&D centers. There is a R&D center in the company's headquarters building in the Shenzhen base, and another R&D center has been established in Anhua. The entire R&D center in the Shenzhen headquarters has approximately more than 12,000 employees of various types.

Then there are two relatively large R&D centers in Shanghai and Beijing, each with thousands of employees.

Some important cities, such as Jiangcheng, Chuancheng, Tongcheng, etc., also have R&D centers with thousands of people. For example, Tongcheng is the base camp of Zhiyun Microelectronics, with two to three thousand R&D engineers of various types.

The above are only the R&D institutions directly under the group headquarters and key wholly-owned subsidiaries, which are mainly engaged in the R&D of smart terminals, chip design, chip manufacturing and some software Internet businesses.

There are also some R&D departments of holding companies, which have not been included.

In addition, Zhiyun Technology also has many R&D centers abroad... Zhiyun Technology's investment abroad is basically concentrated in the fields of R&D and sales, and in the establishment of some data centers to provide data services for local and nearby businesses.

However, it does not involve investment in specific manufacturing fields. Only a few factories were purchased along with overseas assets, but the number is not large and they are also gradually shifting to the domestic market.

Investments in the sales field are spread all over the world, even in Africa... The focus is on Europe, ASEAN and North America. Basically, in countries with larger scale, Zhiyun Technology will set up a branch locally to carry out sales, marketing, after-sales, technical support and other businesses, but the size of the branches varies.

Investment in R&D is currently concentrated in Singapore, London, Munich, Paris and Silicon Valley in the United States, all of which are economically developed regions with abundant educational resources. In addition, there are some R&D centers brought about by the acquisition of overseas subsidiaries.

For example, the R&D center in Munich, Germany, is actually the R&D center of a former German memory company. After being acquired by Zhiyun Technology, it was renamed and integrated into Zhiyun Germany R&D Center, and continued to focus on R&D work in the memory field.

There are many similar situations.

Zhiyun Technology has been on a buying spree, acquiring dozens of overseas companies, which has also brought in a large number of overseas R&D centers, factories and foreign employees.

From this perspective, Zhiyun Technology is actually a serious multinational company.

When conducting overseas acquisitions and needing to mobilize a large amount of funds, there is no need to even draw funds from the domestic market... because Zhiyun Technology's many overseas companies have a lot of cash flow, so there is no need to draw funds from the domestic headquarters.

Zhiyun Technology has so many R&D centers around the world. The one in Jiangcheng is not the largest, nor the most important one, but it still ranks among the top ten.

And its importance continues to increase... Therefore, Zhiyun Technology has not stopped recruiting locally and has been recruiting on a large scale.

Given the importance of this place, Xu Shenxue's first stop after getting off the plane was Jiangcheng Zhiyun Technology Building, which is also an office building purchased by Zhiyun Technology locally. It is not very large, with only 30 floors. It was renamed Zhiyun Technology Building after the purchase.

After a brief inspection of the branch, Xu Shenxue went to the nearby development zone to see the R&D building under construction. This is the office building being built by Zhiyun Technology's Jiangcheng branch after it acquired the land. It is designed to be more than 40 stories high to accommodate a large number of employees in the future.

After all, Zhiyun Technology is planning to set up a large-scale R&D center in the local area, and will also have industrial layout in the field of semiconductor design and manufacturing in the future, which will have a huge demand for office space. Acquiring land to build office buildings is already the norm for Zhiyun Technology.

Zhiyun Technology has established branches in major cities across the country to conduct research and development, or has industrial investment layout in local areas, so it has a large number of employees in some important cities.

In order to solve the office problem, Zhiyun Technology acquired land and built buildings while directly purchasing ready-made office buildings.

Anyway, Zhiyun Technology does not require to be located in some central urban area, and Zhiyun Technology does not need any commercial CDB center to raise its value... On the contrary, many places need Zhiyun Technology to move in to raise land prices!

Therefore, Zhiyun Technology has acquired land in many places to build new office buildings, or directly purchased office buildings in second- and third-tier cities, or simply in some new development zones...cheap!
The overall cost is not high either.

Because of the frequent purchase of buildings, land and construction, although Zhiyun Technology is a high-tech company, it actually owns a large number of commercial properties of various types.

There are four buildings in Shenzhen alone, and they have also acquired land to build a new Zhiyun Building.

There are also many in other major cities.

When we finally counted, we had more than twenty office buildings of various types on hand... and eight of them were under construction.

Many so-called commercial real estate companies do not have as many commercial properties in their hands or under construction as it does...

This is just talking about some purely commercial office buildings and the like, not including various industrial lands, which are much more... and a lot of industrial lands don’t even need to be purchased, the local governments give them away for free... But even if the local governments give them away for free, Zhiyun Technology still has to carefully consider whether to go.

After all, compared with the huge investment, the money for a small piece of industrial land is nothing.

After taking a quick look at the building, Xu Shenxue attended a local welcome dinner that evening.

The next morning, Xu Shenxue led his team to conduct formal negotiations with Jiangcheng Semiconductor... In fact, this so-called negotiation was just superficial.

Because all the detailed terms had already been negotiated by Zhiyun Technology’s strategic investment department...even the contract was ready.

The reason why Xu Shenxue came in person was not to participate in the negotiations, but to show his importance.

Thus, in a friendly and harmonious atmosphere, the two parties reached a final strategic cooperation and signed their respective contracts.

According to the strategic cooperation between the two parties, Zhiyun Microelectronics, a subsidiary of Zhiyun Technology, acquired Jiangcheng Semiconductor in full and provided an investment of US$500 million in the follow-up to expand production and improve technology.

After acquiring this factory, Zhiyun Microelectronics will build an advanced chip foundry around this factory, introduce a new generation of chip production lines with DUV immersion lithography machines as the core, and introduce a new generation of 3D NAND Flash technology in the flash memory field.

After integrating several of its overseas flash memory subsidiaries, Zhiyun Semiconductor acquired patents and corresponding technologies in the field of 3D NAND Flash, and applied them to its own flash memory products.

In the future, a large number of flash memory orders will be given to Jiangcheng Semiconductor to build the country's top flash memory production base.

Jiangcheng Semiconductor will subsequently focus on foundry production in the flash memory field and provide flash memory products to the group and other customers.

At the same time, we will also focus on the foundry production of memory products.

After integrating the memory businesses of several of its overseas subsidiaries, Zhiyun Semiconductor launched Zhiyun-branded memory particle products to the market. The foundry production of these memory products will also be gradually transferred to China.

Especially the relatively backward DDR2 products.

In general, the chip projects developed by Zhiyun Semiconductor itself and those acquired will eventually be outsourced to Zhiyun Microelectronics and some other domestic chip foundries.

At present, SMIC has actually taken over a large number of chips from Zhiyun Semiconductor, mainly memory foundry business... By the way, SMIC currently rarely engages in traditional CPU/GPU foundry business, but mainly engages in memory foundry, but the process is not very good, so even if Zhiyun Semiconductor wants to support domestic chip foundries, it can only give orders for products with backward processes.

Truly top-level memory and flash memory products, such as the latest generation of 3-nanometer DDR products, are used in Zhiyun phones and Zhiyun notebooks, and are also supplied to external parties. This series of advanced memory products is outsourced to TSMC.

Needless to say, the field of mobile phone SOC is all outsourced to TSMC, and it is even in contact with Sixin... Although Zhiyun Technology and Sixin are competitors, the two parties still have a lot of cooperation.

(End of this chapter)