Can the filter capacity support 5G speed up?

Following the request of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on February 22 to resume the 5G construction, the Politburo meeting on March 4 again emphasized the acceleration of the construction progress of projects under construction and promoted the rapid development of 5G networks.

It should be noted that as an information infrastructure, 5G networks can greatly play a key investment role and is considered to be one of the important directions of my country's "new infrastructure". Among the seven major areas of new infrastructure, 5G base station construction ranks first.

Under the demand for speeding up the construction of 5G base stations, new requirements are also put forward for the capacity of the filter.

It is well known in the industry that the number of base station filters in the 5G era has increased from a single number in the 3G/4G era to 64-96; its material has also changed from metal to ceramic.

At present, Huawei is dominated by ceramic dielectric filters, while ZTE is dominated by metals, and the transition to ceramics is still a big possibility. The market estimates that the size of the filter market will average around 20 billion annually in the next five years, of which the ceramic dielectric filter market will reach tens of billions.

In response to this demand, there are more and more domestic manufacturers of ceramic filters. Last year, a number of filter manufacturers were actively expanding production lines and expanding production capacity reserves. According to the incomplete statistics of the micro-network, Canqin Technology, Aifu Electronics, Dafu Technology, Sega Technology, Chunxing Precision Engineering and others all have production expansion projects.

According to the expansion of these manufacturers and the progress of the project, the shortage of ceramic filter capacity in 2020 will be improved. However, an unexpected epidemic has affected the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain such as resumption of production, capacity reserve, order delivery and logistics control.

Industry insiders said, "The impact of the epidemic is inevitable, and the current capacity of most suppliers has not been fully restored. At this node, macro-level policy support has helped the entire 5G infrastructure construction to be on track and has also released the industry chain. Positive signal. But in reality, it will take some time to restore production capacity and continue to expand production capacity, so as to keep up with the pace of 5G acceleration."

Although the current favorable policies for 5G construction are frequent, the resumption of production and production capacity supply of the relevant manufacturers are of great importance, and therefore have attracted the attention of the industry and the market.

Overseas orders are affected, production capacity gradually recovers and improves

At present, the upstream and downstream industrial layout of 5G ceramic filters is still being gradually improved, and many ceramic filter manufacturers have gradually entered the field of ceramic filters.

However, due to the current process difficulties and low yields, there are not many manufacturers that can have upstream ceramic powder formulation processes, mass production dielectric filters and debugging capabilities, and have already realized batch supply, such as Aifu Electronics, Canqin Technology, Chunxing Seiko, Wuhan Fangu, etc.

In order to understand the current production capacity of the filter market, Jiwei Net called the above listed companies as investors, and most of them failed to connect. Among them, Chun Xing Jinggong Dong Mi Office said: "The current production capacity and orders are very saturated, and the resumption rate has reached 80%. Raw materials and logistics are also gradually restored, with less impact, and domestic orders have gradually increased."

Talking about the status of the rapid outbreaks overseas, Chunxing Seiko, which has a certain proportion of export orders, also admitted: "The status of export orders is currently affected, especially the delivery of orders in South Korea is affected by transportation to a certain extent."

In addition, Wuhan Fangu, which is in the center of the epidemic area, has not yet resumed work as requested by Hubei Province; however, it said on the interactive platform that some models of ceramic dielectric filters based on last year passed customer certification and gradually increased the amount. 5G orders on the market are sufficient, and the capacity utilization rate is high.

According to industry sources, the production capacity of ceramic dielectric filters affected by the epidemic is gradually recovering, and the capacity expansion project is also being promoted. Together with favorable policies, the second quarter will gradually improve.

It is worth noting that in addition to Huawei's 5G base station equipment currently mainly uses ceramic filters, ZTE and Nokia are focusing on metal cavity filters. The main products of domestic traditional filter manufacturers such as Wuhan Fangu, Dafu Technology and Sega Technology are metal coaxial cavity filters, which occupy a large market share in the 4G era. As ceramic filter solutions gradually become mainstream, ZTE is also likely to transition to ceramic filters.

In addition, some people in the industry said to Jiwei that Huatian Technology currently supplies cavity filter products for ZTE, with a recovery rate of over 80%, but based on logistics control, it is about three days slower than usual, and the overall production capacity has not been fully restored. However, from the demand side of Huawei and ZTE, the current 5G orders have not been affected.

In addition, due to the pollution problems of back-end manufacturers such as electroplating and die casting, the resumption rate is not high, which has a certain impact on the upstream suppliers' capacity and shipment status.