In the fierce competition in the global chip market, China's chip industry has ushered in a historic breakthrough. In 2024, China's chip exports exceeded the 1 trillion yuan mark for the first time, becoming the focus of the global market. However, despite the achievements, the import dependence of high-end chips is still significant, and the challenges ahead are still severe.

According to the data recently released by the General Administration of Customs, in 2024, China's chip industry has made remarkable achievements in the global market, and import and export data have achieved substantial growth, showing China's important position in the global chip market.

China's chip sales are exploding

In 2024, China's chip exports reached 298.11 billion pieces, and the export value reached 159.4991 billion US dollars (about 1.156 trillion yuan), an increase of 18.7%. This data not only marks the first time that China's chip exports have exceeded the 1 trillion yuan mark, but also makes it the single highest export value, surpassing traditional export strengths such as clothing, textiles and mobile phones.

From the historical data, China's chip exports increased from $101.578 billion in 2019 to $159.499 billion in 2024, and in addition to a brief decline in 2023, the overall export amount showed a continuous growth trend. This shows that despite external pressure and technology blockade, China's chip industry still maintains a strong momentum of development.

Import growth: high-end chip dependence is still to be broken

Despite the impressive export performance, China's chip imports are still huge. In 2024, the number of chips imported by China reached 549.2 billion, a year-on-year increase of 14.51%, and the import amount reached 385.6 billion US dollars (about 2.8 trillion yuan), a year-on-year increase of 10.36%. This shows that China's reliance on high-end chips is still large, especially in key areas such as processors, controllers and memory chips.

Among the imported chips, processors and controllers account for up to 50%, and memory chips account for about 25%. These chips mainly involve high-performance computing chips such as cpus, Gpus and AI chips, as well as memory chips such as DRAM memory and NAND flash memory. This shows that China's independent innovation ability in the field of high-end chips still needs to be further improved to reduce its dependence on imported chips.

Trade deficits and future challenges

Although China's chip exports are growing rapidly, the scale of imports is still greater than the scale of exports, and the trade deficit still exists. In 2024, China's chip trade deficit reached $226.1 billion (about 1.6 trillion yuan), showing that China's import dependence on high-end chips is still large.

In the future, China's chip industry still faces many challenges. On the one hand, the breakthrough of high-end chip technology requires more time and resource investment; On the other hand, international trade frictions and external technological blockades may also have a certain impact on industrial development. However, with the continuous efforts and technological innovation of Chinese chip enterprises, China's chip industry is expected to gradually narrow the gap with the international advanced level in the future.