Applied economics
By The Economist
From The Economist
Published: September 30, 2013
Sep 28th 2013 | TOKYO |From the print edition
The quest for scale brings about a rare American-Japanese merger.
THESE should be glorious days for the firms that supply the semiconductor industry. Demand for personal computers is crashing, but the market for smartphones and tablets has soared. The "internet of things", in which billions of machines will converse with each other, is a vision of the near rather than the distant future.
More devices mean more demand for chips—which in turn must be made on machines that can cost tens of millions of dollars. Yet the outlook for the makers of those machines is uncertain. That largely explains why on September 24th the biggest of them, America's Applied Materials, and the third-biggest, Tokyo Electron of Japan, said they were joining forces to create a new company worth $29 billion. Together they will have just over a quarter of the market, about twice as much as ASML of the Netherlands, the second-biggest.
The equipment-makers face a small, ever more powerful group of customers. Just three companies—Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung—will account for more than half of this year's purchases of kit by the chipmaking industry, says Gartner, a research firm. Tokyo Electron used to have a more robust customer base of midsized Japanese semiconductor firms, but as these have weakened it has become more dependent on the few big foreign customers.
The chief goal of the deal for both firms, therefore, is to strengthen their hand against their giant clients, says Tetsuya Wadaki, an analyst at Nomura Securities. Joining up will help them resist downward pressure on prices. Another plan is to try to get clients to change the way they pay: not just for large equipment sales, but more regularly for services and maintenance, rather like the business model adopted by Rolls-Royce, a maker of aircraft engines.
If that strategy succeeds, it could help with the industry's second big problem, which is large cyclical swings in demand—which are made all the more severe because of having so few customers. This year, forecasts Gartner, chipmakers will have cut their spending on semiconductor equipment by 8.5%, to $35 billion, mainly because the mobile-phone market has been softer than they expected. Their spending should pick up in 2014 and 2015. But in the meantime both Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron have suffered weak sales and profits.
A further motivation for joining forces is that equipment-makers must plan far ahead, investing in the machines that will make the next generation of chips. This is a hugely expensive business. In the case of "extreme ultraviolet" technology, a method of packing even finer circuitry onto silicon wafers, the three big chipmakers have even had to step in and share the burden. They have all taken equity stakes in ASML, and contributed to its R&D budget. Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron hope that by merging they can cut costs by $500m a year within three years, giving them more to spend on product development.
Although the all-share deal is billed as a merger of equals, Applied Materials is clearly the senior partner. In the early 1990s the company was celebrated in its home country for showing that an American semiconductor-equipment maker could take on Japanese firms, which then had nearly half of the global market. Now the shareholders of Applied Materials will own 68% of the new company. Its boss, Gary Dickerson, will become the chief executive, and Tetsuro Higashi, Tokyo Electron's boss, will stay as chairman.
Presumably to assuage Japanese sensitivities about an American takeover, each side will name five members of an 11-strong board (the last will be agreed on jointly) and both head offices, in Santa Clara and Tokyo, will be kept. Mr Dickerson will move to Tokyo. Sometimes saving face matters as much as saving money.
半導體設備商合併 創造規模經濟
2013-09-30 Web only 作者：經濟學人
導體產業供應商的黃金時代。個人電腦需求崩潰，不過，智慧型手機和平板電腦市場的需求大漲，讓數十億台機器相互聯繫的「物聯網」，也不再是遙遠的夢想。
更多裝置，代表更高的晶片需求，而晶片必須使用要價數千萬美元的機器製造。不過，這些機器的製造商，前途卻充滿不確定性。這大致解釋了最大的製造商應用材料和第三大的東京威力科創，為何會在9月24日宣佈合併，創造價值290億美元的新企業。合併後的新企業將佔有近四分之一的市場，約為第二大的ASML的兩倍。
這些設備製造商得面對越來越強大的一小群客戶。顧能研究公司指出，單是英特爾、台積電和三星，就佔了半導體產業今年超過半數的設備採購。東京威力科創過去曾擁有活力十足的日本中型半導體企業客戶，但隨著這些企業走弱，東京威力科創也越來越倚賴外國大客戶。
野村證券的和田木哲哉指出，兩間公司進行合併的主要目標，就是強化面對大客戶的談判能力。合併有助於對抗價格削減的壓力，另一個目的則是讓客戶改變其付費方式，除了大型設備銷售之外，同時要求客戶支付服務和維護費用，就如同勞斯萊斯的飛機引擎商業模式。
若此策略成功，就能解決此產業的第二個大問題，亦即需求的周期性變化起伏太大。顧能預估，晶片製造商今年的半導體設備支出將會降至350億美元，大約減少8.5％，主因為行動電話市場的表現不如預期。支出應該會在明後年回升，但在這段期間，應用材料和東京威力科創都得面臨銷售和利潤不振的困境。
合併的另一項誘因，則是設備製造商得預先計畫，投資用來製造下一代晶片的機器，這些投資金額都相當龐大，例如「極紫外光」技術就得靠3大晶片製造商出手共同負擔。3大晶片製造商都投資了ASML的股份，並分擔研發預算。應用材料和東京威力科創希望，合併後3年內可以節省5億美元年成本，如此一來便有更多資金可以用於產品研發。
此合併案全數採行換股交易，並對等合併的名義進行，不過應用材料顯然就是收購者。90年代初期，應用材料在美國極受讚譽，因為它證明了美國半導體設備製造商也能對抗佔有全球近半數市場的日本企業。現在，應用材料的股東將擁有新企業68％的股份，應用材料總裁迪克森（Gary Dickerson）將出任新成立企業的執行長，東京威力科創總裁東哲郎則留任董事長。
或許是為了緩和日本人對於美國併購的敏感神經，雙方都會提名5位成員加入11人的董事會（最後一名由雙方共同決定），兩家公司的總部皆予以保留，迪克森也會將辦公室移至東京。有時，面子就和省錢一樣重要。（黃維德譯）
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