Recently, multiple foreign media outlets reported that Intel announced plans to lay off 15% of its workforce, affecting approximately 15000 job positions. As a globally renowned supplier of automotive semiconductor products, this decision immediately drew widespread attention from the industry to the stability of automotive chip supply.
Jack West, Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Automotive Division, has publicly stated that the company has provided information and entertainment system chips for over 50 million cars, and 18 car manufacturers have adopted Intel's technology in their electric vehicles and software systems. The announcement of the layoff plan undoubtedly brings new uncertainty to car manufacturers.
According to a report by Huajing Industrial Research, automotive chips mainly refer to semiconductor products used for automotive electronic control and in vehicle systems, including main control chips, MCU functional chips, power chips, storage chips, analog chips, and sensor chips. At present, domestic enterprises have a certain share in the mid to low end market, while the high-end market is mainly dominated by foreign companies such as NXP and Infineon.
As the automotive market moves towards an advanced stage of intelligence, the demand for high-performance computing chips, image processing units, and other intelligent driving chips is increasing year by year. In this field, overseas companies such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Intel, as well as domestic companies such as Huawei, Black Sesame Intelligence, and Horizon Robotics, are engaged in fierce competition.
In the first quarter of 2024, the performance of overseas companies' automotive chip businesses varied. Specifically, Qualcomm achieved a revenue of $598 million, a year-on-year increase of 31%, accounting for 6.02% of total revenue; NVIDIA's automotive business revenue reached 329 million US dollars, accounting for 12.7% of the total revenue; Intel's automotive subsidiary Mobileye had revenue of $239 million during the same period, a year-on-year decrease of 48%. On the domestic front, although Huawei's intelligent automotive business grew by 128.1% year-on-year, it is still in a loss making state; Black Sesame Intelligence and Horizon Robotics are also facing similar financial challenges.
In fact, since 2024, many leading manufacturers in the automotive chip market, including Texas Instruments (TI), STMicroelectronics (ST), and Renesas, have generally faced challenges. The performance of the automotive segment market has declined, and demand recovery has fallen short of expectations. For example, STMicroelectronics' financial report shows that it achieved a revenue of 3.47 billion US dollars in the first quarter of 2024, a year-on-year decrease of 18.4%; Gross profit margin of 41.7%, a year-on-year decrease of 8 percentage points; Net profit was 513 million US dollars, a decrease of 50.9%.
At present, the chip market is facing the problem of intensified structural differentiation of market demand. According to Tao Yang, an analyst at Qunzhi Consulting, "This is mainly attributed to structural overcapacity in the industry, and the market is currently in a stage of oversupply." Especially for general-purpose chips such as MCU and PMIC, due to their relatively low threshold and low process requirements, they are prone to inventory backlog when the overall market growth slows down.
Another viewpoint suggests that the new energy vehicle market is entering a more stable growth phase rather than the previous explosive growth, with sales falling short of expectations, which is also a key factor contributing to the current inventory backlog in the market. According to data from iMedia Consulting, the global new energy passenger car market is expected to exceed 10 million units in 2022 and grow to 17.5 million units by 2024.
Although the growth rate of the global new energy vehicle market has slowed down, the performance of the Chinese market remains strong. The latest data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers shows that in July 2024, the retail sales of conventional fuel vehicles in China were about 840000 units, while the retail sales of new energy vehicles in the market were about 878000 units. For the first time, the monthly retail sales of new energy passenger vehicles in China exceeded those of fuel passenger vehicles.
With intelligent technology becoming a new focus in the development of new energy vehicles, coupled with the active investment of automotive companies in end-to-end solutions and pure visual intelligent driving technology, the market demand for chips with high performance and high computing power will continue to grow. Especially in the high-end automotive chip fields such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), intelligent cockpit system on chip (SoC), in vehicle image sensors (CIS), and LiDAR sensors.
According to the IC Insights report, the global semiconductor market is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2030, with the market share of automotive chips growing from 10% to 15%. In the Chinese market, Gaishi Automotive Research Institute predicts that by 2030, the size of China's automotive grade chip market will reach about 300 billion US dollars, equivalent to over 200 billion yuan.