TSMC, Intel, Samsung plan to increase investment in semiconductor equipment

According to the report of the Korean media "BusinessKorea", although people are worried about the impact of the epidemic, semiconductor demand may decline. However, global heavyweight wafer manufacturing companies including TSMC, Intel, and Samsung will increase investment in related semiconductor equipment.
 
The report said that Intel, which is in the leading position in the server and personal computer processor industry, has recently proposed to invest $ 17 billion in 2020 to purchase related equipment. Intel has been steadily increasing investment in equipment in recent years. The investment amount in 2018 was US $ 15.2 billion, and the investment amount in 2019 increased to US $ 16 billion. Its achievements are also significant, including more than 90% of the server processor market, and More than 80% of the personal computer processor market.
 
As for the foundry leader TSMC, it was stated at a recent corporate briefing that capital expenditures in 2020 will reach 15 billion to 16 billion US dollars for equipment procurement and plant construction. In 2018, TSMC's investment was US $ 10.5 billion, and in 2019, the amount rose to US $ 14.8 billion.
 
Recently, TSMC is planning to actively purchase EUV equipment and use it in advanced processes to expand the gap with the second-ranked foundry Samsung. According to the research report of market research agency TrendForce, TSMC's market share in the foundry market for the first quarter of 2020 is as high as 54.1%, which is significantly higher than Samsung's market share of 15.9%. Moreover, TSMC's market share has increased by 1.4 percentage points from the previous quarter, while Samsung has fallen by 1.9 percentage points.
 
Although Samsung still lags far behind TSMC in the foundry industry, it is still the industry leader in the DRAM and NAND Flash memory markets. Although Samsung has not stated that it will make a large-scale investment in 2020, the market expects that Samsung's investment will increase from 2019.
 
Samsung ’s investment in semiconductor equipment in the first quarter of 2020 was 6 trillion won, a 66% increase from the same period in 2019. On the other hand, the company needs to make other additional investments in the production lines of its factories. Its purpose is to focus on investing in profitable practices, not just to increase production, such as DRAM advanced process conversion, Or increase the number of stacked layers of 3D NAND Flash.