Since the Chinese chip manufacturer Tsinghua Unigroup cannot pay its debts, one of the donors has charged a court with the initiation of bankruptcy proceedings. Tsinghua has publicly confirmed this. The group includes the NAND flash manufacturer YMTC as well as the mobile chip manufacturer Unisoc.
Insolvency proceedings threatening
< p class = "p text-width">On Friday, the Tsinghua Unigroup publicly announced the move in a message (Chinese) and announced full cooperation in the context of the legal proceedings for bankruptcy and restructuring of the company. The group's assets are insufficient to pay off the debts it has incurred. As media from Asia report, the creditor is the state-owned Huishang Bank. The company has missed a number of payment deadlines since November.
Over 30 billion US dollars in debt
According to Reuters, the group had a mountain of debt in June 2020 of $ 31 billion reported in $ 8 billion in cash. By the end of 2020, the Tsinghua Unigroup had defaulted on on- and offshore bonds totaling 3.6 billion US dollars.
China's billion dollar offensive in the semiconductor market
With ample financial backing from the state, the Tsinghua Unigroup was supposed to build a semiconductor infrastructure as part of the Made in China 2025 initiative, which would make China less dependent on foreign companies. The equivalent of up to 100 billion US dollars should flow into chip factories. Among other things, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) became the first manufacturer of 3D-NAND from China, for which a huge factory (cover picture) was built in Wuhan.
It was recently reported that YMTC will not achieve its target of 100,000 wafers with 128-layer NAND per month by the end of 2021. Due to the low chip yield (yield rate), this level should only be achieved in the coming year, according to DigiTimes. The smartphone chip manufacturer Unisoc also fell short of expectations. In February, Nikkei Asia reported that Tsinghua Unigroup would like to sell its stake in Unisoc in order to raise cash.
Overall, the subsidiaries of Tsinghua Unigroup are said not to have achieved the expected income . In January, Reuters learned from internal sources that too much had been invested in unprofitable businesses such as real estate, online gambling and an Indian cell phone manufacturer. The subsidiaries Guoxin Microelectronics (security chips) and Unisplendour (cloud computing) are said to have done well again.