News｜Global Precious Metal Prices Surge, Semiconductor Industry Faces Price Hikes

Recently, there has been a wave of continuous upward movement in the international precious metal market, with prices of metals such as gold, copper, aluminum, and nickel soaring. This surge in prices has not only caused ripples in the global metal market but has also triggered a series of price adjustments in the semiconductor industry. Major semiconductor companies have issued price adjustment notices, including well-known enterprises such as Zhejiang Nanya Microelectronics, Shenzhen Chuxin Microelectronics, Nanjing Zhiling Semiconductor, and Wuxi Huazhong Microelectronics.

The primary driver behind the continuous increase in semiconductor pricing is the rise in prices of upstream materials such as metals in the supply chain. Since the end of 2023, the average price increase in the international precious metal market has exceeded 15%, with some materials seeing hikes of up to 50%, imposing significant cost pressures on businesses. Particularly in the semiconductor packaging and manufacturing sector, copper plays an indispensable role as a raw material for sputtering copper targets, copper anodes for electroplating, copper plating solutions, IC carrier substrates, and PCB copper foils. Metals like copper, gold, and nickel also play crucial roles in advanced packaging's bump connection technology. Therefore, the rapid rise in metal prices directly leads to sharp increases in related costs, forcing semiconductor companies to adjust product prices to cope with market changes.

Of particular concern is the noticeable impact of the price hikes on areas such as power management chip supply within the semiconductor industry. The increase in prices of upstream metal raw materials further elevates packaging costs, consequently leading to upstream assembly and testing plants raising their prices, imposing significant cost pressures on downstream chip manufacturers. Especially in the fiercely competitive domestic market for power management chips, sensitivity to costs is higher, making it a concentrated outbreak category in this wave of price hikes.

However, it's worth noting that most of the semiconductor companies currently affected by the price hikes are small to medium-sized enterprises. This contrasts with the response from Huatian Technology. Huatian Technology has stated that although there have been some recent price hikes, unlike previous widespread price hikes in the market, this time the price hikes are mainly aimed at high-volume essential products rather than general adjustments. They believe that the previous excessive price reductions led to a significant gap between actual costs and market prices, necessitating moderate price adjustments to maintain sustainable business development.

In conclusion, the rapid rise in global precious metal prices has not only attracted attention in financial markets but has also triggered a wave of price hikes within the semiconductor industry. This not only presents challenges to companies' production and operations but also prompts profound reflections across the entire industry chain. In the future, balancing the relationship between raw material costs and product prices will become an important issue facing the semiconductor industry.