Tsinghua Unigroup names telecoms industry veteran as new chairman of mobile chip design unit

Tsinghua Unigroup, which was rescued from bankruptcy a year ago, has named a new chairman for Unisoc, its mobile phone chip unit seen as China’s best hope in the segment after Huawei Technologies Co’s retreat due to US sanctions.

Unigroup said in a statement on Tuesday that group executive vice-president Ma Daojie was appointed chairman and board member of its privately-held chip design subsidiary Unisoc.

Unisoc’s incumbent chairman Wu Shengwu, who was hand-picked by now disgraced former head of Unigroup Zhao Weiguo in 2022, will step down and be appointed to another role later, the statement added, without elaborating.

The change marks another reshuffle of Unisoc’s top brass, which saw CEO Steven Chu Qing step down in March 2022, replaced by Ren Qiwei, Unisoc’s current CEO.

Unigroup said Ma’s “resourcefulness” in the mobile communications industry will play a “positive role” in promoting the future development of Unisoc.

Tsinghua Unigroup completed a year-long debt-restructuring process in July 2022, after a private equity consortium led by state-backed Wise Road Capital bought 100 per cent of Unigroup’s equity from its shareholders Tsinghua Holdings and Beijing Jiankun Investment Group, ending a high-stakes battle to keep afloat one of the nation’s major semiconductor operations.

Unisoc, which focuses on semiconductors for mobile applications, is seen as China’s best hope in this market after Huawei’s in-house chip design unit was crippled by US sanctions. Privately-held Unisoc and sanctions-hit Yangtze Memory Technologies Group are two crucial chip firms under the Unigroup umbrella.