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Tech war: China’s top memory chip maker carefully treads path to semiconductor self-sufficiency as US ponders trade sanctions
- Privately-held Yangtze Memory Technologies Co remains China’s top memory chip maker, despite escalating tensions between Beijing and Washington
- The company faces pressure amid reports that the US plans to ban sales of semiconductor-manufacturing gear to advanced memory chip makers in China
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A few months before the US-China trade war started in July 2018, local media coverage of President Xi Jinping was focused on his efforts to rally the country’s top scientists and engineers to pursue breakthroughs in core technologies, as tensions simmered between Beijing and Washington.
Many of those reports carried Xinhua’s picture of Xi and his entourage clad in white protective coats on a tour of the facilities at Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (XMC), a subsidiary of China’s top memory chip maker Yangtze Memory Technologies Co (YMTC).
Fast forward to the present and YMTC remains a force in China’s semiconductor self-sufficiency drive, but its circumstances have changed. It is no longer owned by tech conglomerate Tsinghua Unigroup, which was acquired in July by Beijing Zhiguangxin Holding. Meanwhile, former Tsinghua Unigroup chairman Zhao Weiguo, who accompanied Xi on that chip factory tour, has been put under investigation.
More importantly, YMTC faces pressure amid the possibility that it might come under new US trade sanctions. The firm, based in Wuhan, capital of central Hubei province, did not reply to requests for comment.
YMTC has been relatively unscathed by the growing tensions between Beijing and Washington. It did not suffer the same fate of major Chinese tech firms like Huawei Technologies Co and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, which were added to Washington’s trade blacklist in the early days of the US-China tech war.
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