Corporate History
SMIC was founded in 2000 by Richard Chang (Traditional Chinese: 張汝京), a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur who had previously worked at Texas Instruments and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Under Chang’s leadership, SMIC built its first fab in the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park in Shanghai, China, and subsequently expanded its manufacturing operations to other cities in mainland China. SMIC is currently the largest and most advanced semiconductor foundry in mainland China. The company was listed on the SEHK and New York Stock Exchange in 2004.
In October 2007, the United States Government enrolled SMIC in its Validated End User (VEU) program as a trusted customer of regulated U.S. technology, thereby reducing many of the export control barriers for SMIC.
In early 2009, Harvard Business School wrote a case study on SMIC's business model, characterized as a Reverse Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT). The case study found that SMIC is executing a strategy that leverages the desires of municipalities in China to build clusters of high technology companies. By partnering with those cities to build new semiconductor fabs that SMIC would then operate under contract, the company could build scale without necessarily confronting immediate large capital outlays. Unlike the Build-Operate-Transfer model that some municipalities were using to build infrastructure like the new subway in Shenzhen, in the SMIC "Reverse BOT model" a municipality would build a capital intensive fab and SMIC would operate it, sharply lowering its capital costs. This model gave the company a unique level of flexibility in an industry where capital costs were the major driver of product costs.
In November 2009, Richard Chang resigned as CEO and was replaced by David N.K. Wang (Traditional Chinese: 王寧國), a former executive of Hua Hong (Group) Co., Ltd. and Applied Materials. Wang served until 2011, when he resigned and Tzu-Yin Chiu (Traditional Chinese: 邱慈雲), an experienced semiconductor industry executive, was appointed as CEO.
Read more about this topic: Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation
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