The Flawed Assumptions Behind China’s Big Semiconductor Fund

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[alexandroutsos]

I love these videos and have been watching for over a year now. Please never burn yourself out. You're a gem in the rough world of information on this platform. stay sane

[adissentingopinion]

Wow, there was a decent smattering of rando negative comments just 30 minutes after posting. Someone touched a nerve.

[serena-yu]

2:24 I lived at the bottom-right corner of this place for my first 10 years after birth (it looked very different before 2008). Then I moved to close to 742 factory, which was later called Hua Jing 华晶 and I regularly went through the road in front of its headquarters 😃. The headquarters were a group of Soviet Russian style building blocks with brick-red roofs inside the city. The photo you showed at 1:37 was the fab outside the city in the 1990s. At the time of setting up this fab, 742 was already renamed into Hua Jing.

[lucysnow]

To be fair, the fund's goal is just no longer realistic due to the dramatic increase in both the volume and price of semiconductor products.

[samwang]

The biggest error is that China assumed the 2025 initiative would lead to key overseas companies into investing in China's vision by providing funds and IP. This did not happen for three reasons: 1. Deteriorating foreign relations with the key western countries, esp the US, tighter export controls soon followed. 2. China's patriotic movement to be eventually self-sufficient. This is scary to foreign companies. 3. The majority of the semiconductor consumption is done through manufacturing facilities of foreign companies in China, China have NO say over what IC to use. In any case, many of these companies have relocated part of their manufacturing facilities to other Asian countries. In short, the carrots and sticks that China have had are simply not good enough

[chad_dogedoge]

Im just asking a question, would opensource RISC-V save Chinese electronics from failure?

[aniksamiurrahman]

Man, you're changing the way I think of high-tech and the role of science and research in the society in general.

[jairo]

On a different note, i saw in another video from another channel, that the reason for the bankruptcies were, at least some of them, that the involved companies were using the money granted to them to invest it on real state, when the market crashed, so did they.

[ryanb]

the problem with stealing from a competent company is that you usually only get to do it once

[KokkiePiet]

Without a doubt one if not the most informative economic tech channels on YouTube!

[aerosoapbreeze]

Funny you mention ONVIF, the open IP camera standard in which you must register as a vetted manufacturer, a critical detail.
Most Chinese companies never register at all. Reality is the vast majority (85℅ +) of Chinese cameras being sold do not follow the "standards" set by them, that is beyond a skin deep level ONVIF compatibility for only the absolute minimum functionally - usually RTSP stream detection works with a crippled PTZ regime. If you open the XML from the ONVIF referrer details you'll see these cameras are all broken or half broken using a handful of bodged filler code chunks, cloned unique ID's, Model numbers, Firmware details etc.

ONVIF is more a perfect example of how an industry standard can devolve into a half broken free for all, and that is due to exactly as stated above. The practice of China's business ethics has made the ONVIF consortium worse off.

Diluting standardisation, can you still even call it a

the cherry you get for free with these Chinese IP camera's is hard coded hidden root / admin credentials, undisclosed Internet facing debug ports, hidden Telnet exposure on non standard ports as default, UDP firewall hole punching P2P protocols that cannot be turned off dispite what you or your settings menu detail, and so on. Beyond that gift who even really knows what going into Unisoc or HiSilicon IC's at the foundry level.

Actually, in some ways it is a pretty fitting example of Chinese tactics in tech

[newwavex]

Man im surprised i've never heard of this industry before.

[_w_w_]

Respect! I am in the industry and I am impressed by your research and the detail of your knowledge!

[TauLim]

Great insight. Those "hedge fund" type guys are not there to cultivate the industry but to make monies from acquiring technologies (which failed) from the supply chain. I don't think any one those six people are semiconductor industry experts.

[eightbighillman]

The painting at the beginning of this video is the north area of Taipei City under Japan's rule back to 1935.

[superheaton]

God favors hard working people and luck will find them. I never seen someone live through life living without consequences, if a person is bad, will do bad things, have bad environment, and create bad environments, bad consequences and bad things. But if work, energy, and therefore our efforts is put forth towards a better future, God favors this.

[adamesd]

Great and very informative video. However, I am confused by something:

The charts showing the exports, imports, and size of China’s IC market and local production of IC’s, starting at 14:07, seem to be inconsistent. Specifically, the COMTRADE and IC Insights numbers seem to contradict each other by a factor of at least two. I realize they are not measuring the exact same thing, but that makes the numbers even worse, actually. How can Chinese exports of IC’s be several times higher than Chinese production of IC’s, for example?

[GoodBaleadaMusic]

I wish we had the democratic power to do this to our corrupt executives. Our jails would be full.

[sachin]

The informations are stunning. Appreciate your effort and understanding man. Keep going. ❤️

[ralllao]

Great video! Could you add to your next videos timestamps for easier skipping to parts?