China’s gray marketplace for semiconductors—which got here into the limelight through the Covid-era chip shortages—may properly be below the microscope amid the chip know-how export curbs imposed by the USA and its allies. A Bloomberg story takes a sneak peek at how the underground chip market in China threw a lifeline to automakers scrambling for MCUs and different semiconductor units through the pandemic.
The story chronicles how the semiconductor gray market operates in China with numerous middlemen offering each secondhand and out-of-date chips. These middlemen usually function by registered firms, which pay taxes, and thus have a authorized cowl. Nevertheless, some brokers are concerned in questionable practices of chip hoarding and worth gouging, thus violating Chinese language laws.
Then there are backdoor chip gross sales from approved brokers, who place surplus orders to promote further chip shares for good-looking earnings. The Bloomberg story narrates a case of how the SUV maker Li Auto in Beijing paid the equal of US$500 for a chip utilized in digital braking methods that price almost US$1 earlier than the Covid pandemic.
Whereas China’s gray marketplace for chips has principally been seen as a get-go venue for automakers, it’s prone to come below the radar when the brand new chip know-how export laws and restrictions take maintain in opposition to China’s know-how sector. Will the underground market in China be capable to promote chips catering to synthetic intelligence (AI) and high-performance compute (HPC) designs? Will freelance brokers in China’s semiconductor gray market be capable to disrupt the provision chain restrictions for high-end chips?
Right here, not like automotive designs, outdated and out-of-date chips won’t have a lot worth. The U.S. curbs are additionally prone to have built-in mechanisms to counter gray market actions. In the meantime, the underground chip market will proceed to serve the huge automotive market in China, together with almost 200 electrical automobile (EV) firms.
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