In recent years, with the continuous development of semiconductor technology and the increasing improvement of application demands, advanced packaging has become an important field driving the upgrading of China's domestic semiconductor industry. Especially with the application of innovative technologies such as 2.5D/3D packaging, Chiplet technology, and system-in-package (SiP), China's advanced packaging industry is ushering in new development opportunities and gradually becoming an important part of the global semiconductor industry.
As the global semiconductor industry recovers moderately, the overall prosperity of the integrated circuit industry has picked up. The recovery of downstream demand has driven the improvement of capacity utilization of advanced packaging enterprises. Benefiting from this, the performance of these enterprises has climbed.
Several advanced packaging enterprises released their 2024 financial reports
JCET expects to achieve an annual operating income of RMB 35.96 billion, a year-on-year increase of 21.24%, a net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies of RMB 1.61 billion, a year-on-year increase of 9.52%, and a net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies after deducting non-recurring gains and losses of RMB 1.55 billion, a year-on-year increase of 17.4%.
In the first quarter of 2025, the company's operation and development maintained a good momentum of steady progress and improvement in quality while maintaining stability. The business structure was further optimized. It is expected that the net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies in the first quarter of 2025 will be about RMB 200 million (unaudited), a year-on-year increase of about 50.00% compared with RMB 135 million in the same period of the previous year.
According to Huatian Technology's 2024 annual report, the company achieved an annual operating income of RMB 14.462 billion, a year-on-year increase of 28%, and an attributable net profit of RMB 616 million, a significant year-on-year increase of 172.29%. However, the net profit after deducting non-recurring gains and losses was only RMB 33.4194 million, a year-on-year increase of 110.85%, indicating that the company relies heavily on non-recurring gains and losses. Huatian Technology's main business is integrated circuit packaging and testing, and its products are widely used in computers, network communications, consumer electronics and other fields. In 2024, with the recovery of demand for electronic terminal products, the company's orders increased, capacity utilization improved, and performance increased significantly. In 2024, the company completed 57.514 billion integrated circuit packages, a year-on-year increase of 22.56%, and 1.7642 million wafer-level integrated circuit packages, a year-on-year increase of 38.58%. These data indicate that the company has achieved significant improvements in production capacity and order volume, but the low level of net profit after deducting non-recurring gains and losses also reflects that the company still has great room for improvement in cost control and profitability.
Tongfu Microelectronics achieved an operating income of RMB 23.882 billion in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 7.24%, a net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies of RMB 678 million, a year-on-year increase of 299.90%, and a net profit attributable to shareholders after deducting non-recurring gains and losses of RMB 621 million, a year-on-year increase of 944.13%.
It is worth noting that AMD, Tongfu's largest customer, contributed nearly 60% of its revenue in 2023. As a strong competitor of NVIDIA, AMD is fully competing for the AI chip market share, which provides a guarantee for Tongfu's orders. Tongfu Microelectronics and AMD have a "joint venture + cooperation" model. In 2016, Tongfu acquired 85% of AMD's shares in Suzhou and Penang, and the interests of both parties are highly bound. In recent years, the company's revenue from AMD has been rising, accounting for 49.32% in 2019 to 59.38% in 2023. According to AMD's latest financial report, Microsoft and others have adopted high-end servers such as MI300, and Tongfu Microelectronics is involved in the packaging and testing projects of MI series products. On April 26, 2024, Tongfu Microelectronics announced the acquisition of part of the equity of Jinglong Technology, entering the third-party chip testing market. Jinglong Technology is the main production base of King Yuan Electronics, the world's largest third-party testing factory, in Chinese mainland.
According to Yongxi Electronics' performance express, the company achieved an operating income of RMB 3.605 billion, a year-on-year increase of 50.76%, a net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 67.0871 million, turning losses into profits year-on-year, and a net profit after deducting non-recurring gains and losses of RMB -24.6716 million, compared with a loss of RMB 162 million in the same period last year. Data shows that the company's main products include high-density fine-pitch bump flip-chip products (FC products), system-in-package products (SiP), wafer-level packaging products (Bumping and WLP), flat no-lead packaging products (QFN/DFN), and micro-electromechanical system sensors (MEMS).
Qizhong Technology achieved an operating income of RMB 1.959 billion in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 20.26%, and a net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies of RMB 313 million, a year-on-year decrease of 15.71%. Although the company's non-display business grew rapidly, its overall scale was relatively small, the proportion of non-full-process was high, and it mainly focused on chip fields such as power management and RF front-end. Its customers were mainly concentrated in Chinese mainland, and its comprehensive strength was far behind that of leading comprehensive packaging and testing enterprises such as JCET, Tongfu Microelectronics, and Huatian Technology.
Jingfang Technology's net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies in 2024 will reach RMB 240 million to RMB 264 million, achieving a significant increase of 59.90% to 75.89% compared with the same period last year. After deducting non-recurring gains and losses, Jingfang Technology is expected to achieve a net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies of about RMB 208 million to RMB 232 million in 2024, showing a substantial increase of 79.39% to 100.09% compared with the same period last year.
Recovery of the advanced packaging market
Overall, the entire advanced packaging market is showing a recovery trend, and basically all have achieved performance growth. Among them, only Qizhong Technology's net profit declined, and Yongxi Electronics turned losses into profits. Except for Jingfang Technology, which did not announce data, most enterprises achieved a growth of 20% - 50% in annual revenue. Although Tongfu Microelectronics' revenue growth was slightly weak, its net profit achieved a growth rate of 300%. In terms of volume, JCET, Huatian Technology, and Tongfu Microelectronics, the three leading enterprises, are leading the domestic advanced packaging market.
Regarding the reasons for the performance growth, JCET mainly benefited from its continuous focus on cutting-edge technologies and key application markets and customers, deep cultivation in the four core application fields of communications, consumption, computing, and automotive electronics. Through measures such as optimizing product structure, improving capacity utilization, and strengthening cost control, it maintained stable profitability.
Tongfu Microelectronics has achieved significant growth in core fields such as SoC, Wi-Fi, PMIC, display drivers, automotive-grade products, Memory business, and FCBGA products. Among them, automotive-grade products performed brilliantly. Relying on the technical advantages of industrial control and automotive-grade products, the company has become a main force in localized automotive packaging and testing, fully expanding automotive power devices, MCU, and smart cockpit products, giving full play to its brand advantages, expanding cooperation with leading enterprises at home and abroad, and the performance of automotive products surged by more than 200% year-on-year.
Huatian Technology's domestic and foreign sales revenue reached RMB 9.268 billion and RMB 5.194 billion respectively, with year-on-year growth of 35.75% and 16.16% respectively. Orders for memory, bumping, automotive electronics and other products increased significantly. 236 new customers were developed, and the optimization of product structure and customer structure was steadily promoted. It is worth noting that government subsidies accounted for a very large proportion of Huatian Technology's profits. In 2024, Huatian Technology issued announcements on obtaining government subsidies eight times, with a total of RMB 480 million in government subsidies throughout the year, of which RMB 446 million was included in the income, becoming the invisible pillar of the company's profits.
Jingfang Technology's growth mainly benefited from the continuous penetration of the trend of automotive intelligence. The application scope of automotive CIS chips is growing rapidly, and the company's packaging business scale and leading advantages in the automotive CIS field continue to improve. In addition, commercial applications have also been realized in new application fields such as MEMS and RF filters. Jingfang Technology is planning a new manufacturing base in Southeast Asia to comply with new market demands and industrial trends.
Qizhong Technology is relatively special. It mainly benefited from the recovery of demand for packaging and testing of non-display chips such as display driver chips, power management chips, and RF front-end chips in 2024. The company continued to expand packaging and testing capacity, continuously improved product quality and service quality, increased efforts to develop new customers, and continuously increased the development of new products, making the company's packaging and testing revenue maintain rapid growth.
Yongxi Electronics has a customer base centered on leading design companies in segmented fields. As the primary supplier of many domestic SoC customers, the company grows together with customers. On the basis of deepening cooperation with the original customer base, it actively expands customer groups including those in Taiwan region of China, Europe and the United States, and domestic HPC and automotive electronics fields, and has made certain progress so far.
Overall, the reasons for the performance growth of enterprises mainly include actively exploring foreign markets and the recovery of semiconductor market demand, especially the demand in fields such as data centers and automotive electronics, which has strongly driven the performance growth of advanced packaging enterprises.
Advanced packaging capacity is in short supply, and production expansion continues
JCET's advanced packaging capacity continues to be tight, and the advanced packaging and high-end testing fields, mainly wafer-level packaging, are in full production. To meet the strong demand of customers, the company is making every effort to expand production.
Tongfu Microelectronics continues to promote the multi-point layout strategy, and has formed a capacity collaboration network in Nantong, Suzhou, Hefei, and Penang, Malaysia. Among them, Nantong has three production bases, and the advanced packaging production lines continue to expand, bringing more obvious scale advantages to the company. The first equipment of its Memory Phase II project has been put into operation, and the new key equipment will help the mass production of high-end products; the Tongfu Tongda advanced packaging and testing base project has started, focusing on advanced packaging products such as multi-layer stacking, and involving key application fields such as communications and memory.
The construction of Huatian Technology's new production base is steadily advancing. Huatian Jiangsu and Huatian Shanghai have entered the production stage, and the construction of Pangu Semiconductor's FOPLP production line has also started. In 2024, the second phase of Huatian Nanjing Integrated Circuit Advanced Packaging and Testing Industry Base project was laid in Pukou District, with an investment of RMB 10 billion, and is expected to be fully completed in 2028. The products will be widely used in storage, radio frequency, computing power, automatic driving and other fields. After reaching production capacity, the company's annual output value is expected to reach RMB 6 billion. Later, Huatian Technology's automotive electronic product production line upgrading project with an investment of RMB 4.8 billion started. After the completion of the project, it is expected to add an annual sales income of RMB 2.159 billion, and the QFP packaging capacity is expected to reach 10KK per day.
In addition to the three leading packaging and testing factories, many emerging advanced packaging projects have also achieved remarkable results. On June 13, 2024, Anmuquan Advanced Packaging Base in Hunan Xiangjiang New Area was put into use. After full production, it will have the advanced packaging capacity of 20 million high-computing power large chips per year, helping Changsha become a domestic highland for advanced packaging of high-end large chips. In late November 2024, the factory of Qili Semiconductor's advanced packaging project (Phase I) was put into use in Shaoxing, and a production line for Chiplet packaging of 2 million large-size AI chips per year has been built; the J2C workshop of Shenghe Jingwei's 3D multi-chip integrated packaging project was successfully capped, which will promote the development of the company's 3D multi-chip integrated processing and ultra-high-density interconnection 3D multi-chip integrated packaging projects. On April 3, 2025, Jingmen City held a centralized start-up activity for major projects in the second quarter, and the Yazhi Microelectronics semiconductor wafer manufacturing and packaging and testing project with a total investment of RMB 4 billion officially started.
Continuously promoting the iteration of domestic advanced packaging technology
At present, domestic advanced packaging enterprises are also constantly carrying out technological iteration.
The XDFOI Chiplet high-density multi-dimensional heterogeneous integration series processes launched by JCET have been stably mass-produced, widely used in high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and other fields, and the advanced packaging business with high-density power supply has grown rapidly, effectively solving the problems caused by the improvement of chip integration and power density.
Tongfu Microelectronics actively launched FCBGA chip packaging technology based on glass core substrates and glass interposers to meet the needs of high-performance chips in multiple fields. Tongfu Microelectronics has now overcome advanced packaging and testing technologies such as Bumping, WLCSP, FC, BGA, and SiP. In addition, the company's ultra-large size 2D+ packaging technology and 3D stacking packaging technology have passed verification.
Huatian Technology's 2.5D and FOPLP projects are progressing smoothly. Products such as double-sided molded BGA SIP and ultra-high integration uMCP have mass production capacity, and indium sheet packaging technology has been mass-produced and applied in many important fields.
Qizhong Technology began to lay out the research and development of non-display advanced packaging technologies such as copper-nickel-gold bumps, copper pillar bumps, and tin bumps in 2015, completed the construction of post-stage DPS packaging in 2019, and is currently building the process of front-side metallization (FSM) & wafer thinning - back grinding/back metallization (BGBM).