Two Candidates Narrowed Down to Alibaba and One More for Acquisition of Chinese Semiconductor Company Tsinghua Unigroup

Tsinghua Uni logo [Photo by Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Byung-hee] Alibaba Group has emerged as a leading candidate to acquire Tsinghua Unigroup (Tsinghua Ziguang Group), a major Chinese semiconductor design and manufacturing company that filed for bankruptcy last July.

According to Chinese economic media Caixin on the 28th (local time), the pool of strategic investor candidates for Tsinghua Unigroup has been narrowed down to two: a consortium of Alibaba and the Zhejiang Provincial State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, and Zilu Zenguang, a private equity fund alliance based in Beijing.

Tsinghua Unigroup announced on the 18th that seven companies, including Alibaba Group and six state-owned enterprises, had applied to participate as strategic investors. The number of acquisition candidates has thus been reduced from seven to two.

Having entered bankruptcy restructuring due to nearly 30 trillion won in debt, Tsinghua Unigroup issued a public notice in July seeking strategic investors to find a new owner.

Earlier, Caixin reported that the strategic investor candidates had expressed intentions to acquire Tsinghua Unigroup at around 50 to 60 billion yuan (approximately 9.2 trillion to 11 trillion won).

Tsinghua Unigroup is a semiconductor design and manufacturing company with 51% of its shares held by Tsinghua University. Alongside foundry company SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), it is one of China’s representative semiconductor firms. As of June last year, Tsinghua Unigroup’s debt amounted to 156.7 billion yuan (about 28.7 trillion won).

Although Alibaba’s main business is online shopping malls, it is expanding into various fields such as semiconductor development, cloud computing, electric vehicles, and advanced logistics.

Meanwhile, the article reporting that the pool of strategic investor candidates for Tsinghua Unigroup has been narrowed to two has been deleted from Caixin’s website and other Chinese internet platforms. In China, when sensitive news that has not been officially announced by authorities is first reported by the media, it is often deleted through censorship regardless of its accuracy.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.