Chinese semiconductor firms report strong performances - Global Times

The collective earnings beat across Chinese semiconductor firms signals something more consequential than a cyclical upturn: domestic substitution has crossed from policy-subsidized to economically self-sustaining. On the technology stack, rising utilization at mature nodes (28nm+) is pulling through equipment orders for etch and deposition tools. More critically, Chiplet and 2.5D/3D advanced packaging are emerging as the most pragmatic workaround to EUV lithography constraints — system-level optimization is replacing single-die scaling as the primary performance lever. Growing PDK adoption on domestic fabs hints that EDA "de-Americanization" is migrating from lab validation to production lines. On compliance, expanding export-control lists are inflating audit and certification costs, but the deeper structural shift is the entrenchment of multi-source supply strategies. Near-term BOM costs rise; long-term supply-disruption risk falls. This is a deliberate trade-off, not a temporary workaround. Competitively, TSMC and Samsung retain their advanced-node moats, but price competition in the 28nm–14nm band is now real. ASML and Applied Materials face an increasingly uncomfortable tension between China-revenue dependence and geopolitical exposure; their pricing power is being eroded. 12–24-month outlook: the "good-enough" AI inference chip market will unlock structural volume for Chinese design houses. The global semiconductor industry is bifurcating into an "advanced-node club" and a "mature-node sovereign stack." This is not a recovery cycle. It is an industrial re-architecture.