China’s top chip foundry SMIC unveils growth action plan

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) launched an action plan to enhance its current businesses and seek new growth in 2026, as the largest contract chipmaker in China aims to solidify its role as the backbone of the country’s self-sufficiency drive. Released alongside its annual report for 2025, the plan outlined a commitment to “optimising existing stock and digging for new increments”, the company said in a stock exchange filing on Thursday. The company said two trends would continue to bring new growth opportunities to the domestic semiconductor industry this year: the return of the supply chain from overseas and the replacement of older products made overseas with new domestic ones. Under the trends, SMIC said it would deepen its expertise in specialised fields such as BCD (bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) technology, which combines the strengths of three different process technologies onto a single chip, as well as analogue chips, specialised memory chips and microcontroller units. The new plan came as the global semiconductor supply chain is under strain from a memory chip super cycle; a frantic ramp-up of production for advanced memory chips – to feed demand from artificial intelligence data centres – is eating up global wafer capacity and driving up production costs. SMIC noted the disruptive impact of the cycle, as it said strong demand for memory driven by AI was currently “squeezing” the memory chip supply for smartphones and other mid and low-end products. With the new action plan, the chipmaker said it was aiming for sales growth above the industry average in 2026. That came after SMIC said in February that it expected flat first-quarter revenue as a decline in low-end orders would partly offset surging demand for chips used in AI applications. In 2025, the company’s monthly production capacity reached 1.06 million wafers, an increase of 111,000 wafers from a year earlier. It invested 5.52 billion yuan (US$779 million) in research and development, equal to more than 8 per cent of its revenue. China’s chipmakers have been expanding their production capacity quickly over the past few years to capitalise on surging AI demand, both by establishing new production lines and expanding existing ones. According to data revealed on Wednesday at Semicon China, the world’s largest chip industry trade show, China’s share of global wafer fabrication capacity for mainstream processes was expected to reach 42 per cent by 2028, signalling the country’s rapid rise in the global semiconductor manufacturing sector. In 2028 alone, 108 new wafer fabs would be built globally, of which 47 would be in China, according to SEMI, the event organiser.