Chinese domestic chip companies have significantly increased investment, with factory construction budgets rising by 79%, and factory construction expenditures are projected to reach $82 billion by 2030. Currently, China's domestic chip production can meet 70% of its domestic demand, steadily reducing its dependence on Taiwanese chip foundries. However, it still lags behind global giants in lithography technology, R&D, and capital investment, with a significant gap in core technology output value.
Benefiting from strong factory construction in China and the recovery of the global supply chain, Goldman Sachs has significantly raised its forecast for the global semiconductor manufacturing equipment (wafer fab front-end equipment) market size to $150 billion, $218 billion, and $281 billion for 2026-2028, respectively. Recent growth is mainly driven by memory chips (DRAM, including next-generation HBM4 memory) and advanced process foundry services; in the medium to long term, it will be supported by capacity expansion in NAND flash memory and Terafab.
Beneficiaries: Applied Materials (AMAT), ASML, and Tokyo Electron are among the leading equipment manufacturers. (The above views are from Goldman Sachs' August 24 report.)
