A decade of hibernation
In 2013, Renesas' board of directors was refreshed, with top executives from automotive giants Toyota and Nissan, and Hisao Sakuta, who has extensive experience in the automotive parts supply chain, called the new CEO, signalling that a big change was on the horizon.
In order to lighten the load, Sakuta Hisao decided to give Renesas first "slimming". 2,000 people scale layoffs is only the appetizer, unprofitable business one by one to feel the cold air:
The LTE modem business for 4G mobile phones was sold to Broadcom, the CMOS sensor factory for mobile phone cameras was sold to Sony, and the display driver IC business for displays was sold to Synaptics.
A series of sell-offs means that Renesas is completely out of the smartphone market, refocusing on its traditional strength: MCUs.
MCU is commonly known as microcontroller, and the biggest application scenario is automotive. Automotive MCU has always been the most profitable and advantageous business for Renesas, occupying nearly 40% of the global market.
Refocusing on MCUs, Renesas quickly regrouped in 2014 to achieve post-establishment profitability. But after brushing off useless fat, how to build muscle becomes a new challenge.
For small-volume, multi-variety MCUs, a strong product portfolio is the foundation of the foundation. 2015, the completion of the historical mission of Hisao Sakuta retired, Renesas ushered in neither semiconductor, nor automotive supply chain Wu Wenjing, who is good at only one thing: mergers and acquisitions.
At the helm of Wu Wenjing period, Renesas successive acquisitions of the U.S. company Intersil (Intersil), IDT, the British company Dialog, to make up for the power management chips, wireless networks and data storage chips, wireless communications on the short board.
While sitting firmly in the automotive MCU boss, Renesas also penetrated into the field of industrial control, intelligent driving, smart phones, A party from Tesla to Apple, all the star leader.
Compared to Renesas, Sony's road to recovery has been more tortuous, but the idea is much the same.
The core of Kazuo Hirai's "One Sony" reform programme is the Playstation outside the terminal products, such as TVs, mobile phones, laptops, to do the titular participation in the war can be, losing to the Koreans is not a shame.
At the same time, we have invested our limited R&D resources in the digital imaging business, represented by CIS chips, to participate in the wave of mobile terminals as a component supplier.
CIS chip (CMOS image sensor) is an electronic device that converts optical images into electrical signals, and is an indispensable part of smartphones, commonly known as the "bottom". 2011, the iPhone 4s for the first time using the Sony IMX145, the concept of CIS began to sizzle.
With Apple's demonstration effect, from Samsung's S7 series to Huawei's P8 and P9 series, Sony's CIS chip has almost become a flagship model standard.
By the time Sony debuted its triple-stacked CMOS image sensor at the ISSCC conference in 2017, the dominance was unassailable.
In April 2018, Sony's annual report ended a decade of losses with the highest operating profit ever. Kazuo Hirai, who announced he was stepping down as CEO not long ago, flashed a long-awaited smile.
Unlike CPUs and GPUs, which rely on integration to increase computing power, MCUs and CISs, as "functional chips", do not require advanced processes, but have higher requirements for reliability and durability, and rely heavily on engineers' accumulated experience and a large amount of tacit knowledge in the design and production process.
In other words, it relies heavily on craftsmanship.
Compared to Sony's high-end CIS still need TSMC foundry, Renesas' MCU products are mostly stuck at 90nm or even 110nm, the technology threshold is not high, and the replacement is slow, but the life cycle is long, and customers will not be easily replaced once they choose.
Therefore, although Japan's memory chips were beaten by South Korea, but in the analogue chip as the representative of the industrial discourse, Japan has almost never bypassed.
Also, in their decade of hibernation, both Renesas and Sony have embraced a thick enough leg to stand on.
The Japanese automobile industry itself has a tradition of "not giving foreigners meat even in a rotten pot", and Toyota's nearly 10 million car sales have provided Renesas with a steady stream of orders.
Sony's mobile phone business, although perennial in the pendulum, but because of the CIS chip is difficult to replace the position, so that Sony can still in the mobile terminal of the last train to make up a station ticket.
Since the second half of 2020, an unprecedented shortage of core drought has gripped the world, with several industries shutting down due to chips. As a long-neglected island of the semiconductor industry, Japan is once again on the stage.
Post time: Jul-16-2023