Editing by Kate Yuan

The Chinese mainland's installed wafer capacity ranks fourth in the world, but is expected to surpass Japan by yearend, according to IC Insights.  

As of December 2020, China accounted for 15.3% of global wafer production capacity, almost the same as Japan, the Global Wafer Capacity 2021-2025 Report by IC Insights showed. For installed wafer capacity ahead of China's mainland are Taiwan region, South Korea, and Japan.

This year China's IC manufacturing has gone very strong, under global IC shortage. According to the IC Insights report, the country produced more than one billion chips every day in June, a historic record.

Also, between January and August this year, China turned out 239.9 billion pieces of IC products, a 48% increase over the same period last year in China’s National Bureau of Statistics data.

SemiDigest, a semiconductor analysis organization, quoted IC Insights’ June report in its August/September monthly issue, with the foreword "China's Booming Semiconductor Industry." The article said that China's wafer production capacity exceeded Europe for the first time in 2010, surpassed the ROW region in 2016, and overtook North America in 2019.  

Meanwhile, the U.S. SIA pointed out in a July white paper that “China’s semiconductor industry has taken a place in a highly competitive and technologically complex global market. While having competitiveness in areas such as memory chips and fabless chip design especially for consumer and industrial applications, China may still lag in advanced logic foundry production, EDA tools, chip design IP, semiconductor manufacturing equipment and materials. It remains to be seen how long this lag will last.”