China’s top chip foundry SMIC unveils growth action plan

Released alongside its annual report for 2025, the plan outlined a commitment to “optimising existing stock and digging for new increments”, the company said in a stock exchange filing on Thursday.

The company said two trends would continue to bring new growth opportunities to the domestic semiconductor industry this year: the return of the supply chain from overseas and the replacement of older products made overseas with new domestic ones.

Under the trends, SMIC said it would deepen its expertise in specialised fields such as BCD (bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) technology, which combines the strengths of three different process technologies onto a single chip, as well as analogue chips, specialised memory chips and microcontroller units.

The new plan came as the global semiconductor supply chain is under strain from a memory chip super cycle; a frantic ramp-up of production for advanced memory chips – to feed demand from artificial intelligence data centres – is eating up global wafer capacity and driving up production costs.

SMIC noted the disruptive impact of the cycle, as it said strong demand for memory driven by AI was currently “squeezing” the memory chip supply for smartphones and other mid and low-end products.