China is set to facilitate numerous opportunities in domestic semiconductors for 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), connected car and autonomous vehicles, officials at accounting consultancy KPMG said on Friday.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has spurred market demand for 5G chips, memory chips and logic semiconductor products,” Jamie Li, partner at KPMG’s integrated chips intelligence industry group in Shanghai, said on the sidelines of the third-annual China International Import Exposition (CIIE) as quoted by the SCMP.
Li added that the Chinese chipmaking industry would keep "sound and continuous" growth and become semi-autonomous over the next few years, but warned it would be unrealistic to reach full self-sufficiency in any country.
“China has a huge consumer market to make technologies originating from universities and research institutes come to fruition,” Li said.
KPMG vice-president, Gong Weili, said that China was reaching a major stage in technological progress, adding: “How to strengthen technological innovation and enhance overall competitiveness is a broad focus of the industry”.
The statements comes after KPMG released its Chiptech 50 list of semiconductor startup firms with the potential to grow due to "good patents and products". Roughly 70 percent are based in the Yangtze River Delta region, consisting of Shanghai as well as the Jiangsu, Anhui and Zhejiang provinces.
But despite optimistic outlooks, the Information Technology Industry Council has warned US president-elect Joe Biden may continue Trump's policies via a multilateral approach and others measures.
"Despite statements during his campaign underscoring the negative impact of China Section 301 tariffs, President-elect Biden has not indicated whether or when the Biden-Harris Administration would rescind them. The Biden-Harris Administration would likely re-engage with [US] allies to collectively push back against China’s unfair trading practices and supply chain security concerns rather than utilizing unilateral tariffs to address concerns around the United States’ goods trade deficit with China," the analysis read.
The news comes amid the State Council's sweeping $1.4tn plan aimed at boosting the nation's domestic production of emerging technologies, including semiconductors, AI, infrastructure, green technologies, and others.
Numerous Chinese tech giants such as Huawei Technologies, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, ZTE, TikTok's ByteDance and others have been targeted by the Trump administration, who cited national security risks and allegations the firms could use their technologies to spy for the Chinese government.
Beijing, Huawei, ZTE and ByteDance have all repeatedly and strongly condemned the accusations as false.
The first CIIE was held in 2018 and has aimed to boost trade liberalisation between China and global markets, as well as facilitating trade and global economic growth as part of the Chinese government's market reforms.
