Korea’s share in Chinese chips imports drops by 5.5% points

The share of Korean exports in China’s semiconductor market has been reduced since Washington slapped sanctions against Beijing.

The Federation of Korean Industries announced Monday that Korea’s share in the Chinese semiconductor imports has fallen by 5.5 percentage points from 2018 to 2021. The fall was even more drastic than that of America’s (fallen by 0.3 percentage points), the architect of the anti-Chinese sanctions. By contrast, the shares of other exporters in Asia rose compared to the pre-sanctions era as indicated by Taiwan (by 4.4 percentage points), Japan (1.8 percentage points), and six ASEAN countries (0.4 percentage point).

From April 2019 to September 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce put Huawei and SMIC on a trade blacklist over four times, blocking their supplies of semiconductors produced by using American software and equipment.

Compared to 2018, the size of China’s semiconductor imports swelled by 37.2 percent last year. Chinese imports increased by 6.5 percent, but the rise was meager compared to the growth of the Taiwanese or Japanese imports (by 57.4 and 34.8 percent, respectively).

The biggest contributor to the fall in Korea’s share in the Chinese imports was American’s sanctions, which prevented Korean companies from supplying for Huawei. As of 2019 when the sanctions began to be imposed, the shares of Huawei in Samsung Electronics’ and SK Hynix’s revenues stood at 3.2 percent (about 7.37 trillion won) and 11.4 percent (about 3 trillion won).


will@donga.com