5G infrastructure speed up, ceramic filter capacity supply can meet the peak demand?

filter capacity can support 5G speed-up?

Following the February 22 Ministry of Industry and Information Technology resumption of production meeting called for speeding up 5G construction, the March 4 Politburo meeting again stressed to speed up the construction of projects under construction, to promote the accelerated development of 5G network.

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

In the 5G base station construction speed up the demand, the production capacity of the filter also put forward new requirements.

The industry knows that the number of filters for base stations 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.

Huawei is currently dominated by ceramic dielectric filters, while ZTE is dominated by metals, with a high probability of transition to ceramics. Market estimates, the filter market size in the next 5 years, the average size of about 20 billion per year, of which the ceramic dielectric filter market size of up to tens of billions.

Under this demand, there are more and more manufacturers of ceramic filters in China. Last year, many filter manufacturers were actively expanding their production lines and expanding their production capacity reserves. According to the collection of micro-network incomplete statistics, Canqin Technology, Aifu Electronics, Dafu Technology, Sega Technology, Chunxing Seiko, etc. have expanded production projects.

According to the expansion of production and project progress of these manufacturers, the shortage of ceramic filter production capacity will improve in 2020. However, a sudden outbreak led to the resumption of production, capacity reserves, order delivery and logistics control and other industrial chain upstream and downstream are affected.

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

Although the current 5G construction favorable policy frequently, but the real relevant manufacturers to resume production and capacity supply situation is significant, and therefore much industry and market attention.

Overseas orders affected, production capacity gradually recovered to improve

Currently, 5G ceramic filter upstream and downstream industry layout is gradually improving, there are a number of ceramic filter manufacturers in the field of ceramic filters.

But due to the current process difficulties and low yield, can have upstream ceramic powder formulation process, at the same time with mass production of dielectric filters and debugging capabilities, and has achieved batch supply of manufacturers are not many, such as Aifu Electronics, Canqin Technology, Chunxing Seiko, Wuhan Van Valley and so on.

In order to understand the current capacity situation of the filter market, Jiweiwang called the above-mentioned listed companies as an investor, and most of them failed to connect. Among them, only Chunxing Seiko Dong Mi Office said: "The current production capacity and orders are very saturated, the resumption rate has reached 80%, raw materials, logistics, etc. are also gradually recovering, the impact is small, while domestic orders have gradually increased."

Talking about the current situation of the rapid outbreak overseas, Chunxing Seiko, which has a certain percentage of export orders, also admitted: "The current status of export orders is affected to some extent, especially the delivery of orders in Korea is affected to some extent by transportation."

In addition, Wuhan Fangu, located in the center of the epidemic area, has not yet resumed work under the requirements of Hubei Province to resume work. However, it said on the interactive platform that some models of ceramic dielectric filters based on last year passed customer certification and were gradually increased in quantity. Overall, 5G orders were sufficient and capacity utilization was high.

Industry insiders said that due to the impact of the outbreak of ceramic media filter production capacity are gradually recovering, the expansion of production capacity projects are also advancing, coupled with favorable policies, the second quarter will gradually improve.

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

In addition, some people in the industry told Jiweiwang that Huatian Technology currently supplies cavity filter products to ZTE, with a resumption rate of over 80%, but based on logistics control, it is about three days slower than usual, and the overall production capacity has not fully recovered. However, from the demand side such as Huawei and ZTE, 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 capacity and shipment status of upstream suppliers.