Driven by the digital wave, China has continuously accelerated the deep integration of industrialization and digitization in recent years. The latest Action Plan for the Construction of Digital China 2025 issued by the National Data Bureau clearly states that by the end of 2025, the added value of the core industries of the digital economy will account for more than 10% of GDP, and the computing power scale will exceed 300EFLOPS. Artificial intelligence, industrial Internet, intelligent connected vehicles and other fields will become the core engine of semiconductor demand explosion. This strategic deployment not only injects policy dividends into the local semiconductor industry, but also attracts global leading enterprises to accelerate their layout. Recently, the "NXP 2025 Automotive Leadership Media Open Day" was held in Dalian. The reporter interviewed Li Xiaohe, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the China Business Unit of NXP Semiconductors, and conducted in-depth discussions on NXP's China strategy, local layout, and technological development trends.
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Strengthening investment in the Chinese market is an inevitable choice
With the continuous promotion of industrialization and digitization, the development speed of China's technology industry has been very fast in recent years, which has effectively driven the high-speed development of the semiconductor field. According to WSTS data, the global semiconductor market is expected to reach $700.9 billion by 2025, a year-on-year increase of 11.2%, with China accounting for approximately 30%, making it one of the largest semiconductor consumer markets in the world. Customs import and export data also shows that from January to May 2025, China imported 231.5 billion pieces of integrated circuits, an increase of 8.4%, or approximately 156.8 billion US dollars; The export volume was 135.9 billion yuan, an increase of 19.5%, about 73.26 billion US dollars.
The huge market demand and constantly evolving innovation momentum have led more and more global semiconductor companies to attach great importance to China. Li Xiaohe emphasized the importance of the Chinese market in his speech at the "NXP 2025 Automotive Leadership Media Open Day". The Chinese market not only accounts for one-third of NXP's sales. More importantly, in recent years, we have seen many representatives of new quality productivity in China. For example, China now accounts for 70% of the world's electric vehicle production and sales, 76% of battery production comes from China, and 56% of the world's largest robotics company comes from China. This has an important promoting effect on the company's long-term development
Li Xiaohe believes that different companies have different development strategies due to their different "DNA", starting points, and core businesses. Based on the characteristics of NXP, over 50% of its business comes from automobiles. The automotive processing industry accounts for about 75% of total sales. The Chinese market accounts for 35% of the company's total sales. This means that automotive and industrial are the two most important industry markets for NXP, while China is the most important regional market.
In addition, since integrating Freescale in 2016, NXP has gradually developed into a strong system oriented enterprise, one of the few in the world that masters microprocessors, sensors, connection chips, analog chips, and security chips, and can organically combine functional safety and system safety.
Over the years, NXP has continuously strengthened its system capabilities in the hope of better empowering enterprises in the automotive, industrial, and other fields. China is not only a major global automotive and industrial market, but also the most important regional market for NXP, coupled with the characteristics of NXP's strong systems company. It is almost inevitable for NXP to strengthen its investment in the Chinese market.
Defining and designing products in China
In fact, NXP has been strengthening its investment in the Chinese market over the years. Data shows that NXP has been deeply involved in China for 39 years. So far, NXP has 6000 employees in China, including 1600 engineers. At the same time, NXP has built 6 research and development centers, 14 office locations, and the world's largest backend assembly and testing factory in China.
More noteworthy is that on January 1st of this year, NXP established its China business unit. This can be seen as an important step for NXP to strengthen its domestic strategy in China. According to Li Xiaohe's introduction, the China Business Unit is not only a sales entity, but also integrates capabilities such as sales, research and development, operations, quality, and technical support. This allows NXP to provide Chinese users with more competitive products, faster innovation cycles, better product optimization, and better research and development efficiency, which can better implement the concept of "in China, for China".
On this basis, Li Xiaohe further proposed the concept of "in China, for the world". The establishment of the China Business Unit also has a great promoting effect on this. Because with the innovative development of Chinese enterprises in the fields of automobiles, industry, etc., their competitiveness continues to strengthen. Now, China's automobile, industrial and other markets have led the global development, representing the strongest competitiveness in the world. We believe that success in China can also become success in the world
In cooperation with the construction of the China business unit, NXP has established product management, product definition and other teams in addition to technical support and production teams. Many critical products will be defined and designed in China. For example, the latest generation of battery management products released by NXP for the global market is defined in China. When the technical team of NXP China Business Unit is developing a project, they can combine research and development resources from both China and overseas. Overseas R&D engineers will also be integrated into the same project team to work with Chinese engineers on product development. The related project products are managed and defined in China, and China is the first to conduct rapid verification with customers.
It is reported that through this approach, NXP has launched several products, including the latest 18 channel lithium battery cell controller BMx7318/7518 series IC products. The related products are not only shipped in the Chinese market, but also widely accepted in overseas markets.
New trends provide new growth
As the automotive industry continues to promote the transformation towards intelligence and electrification, semiconductor technology has become the foundation and core driving this change. The global automotive semiconductor market is expected to exceed 65 billion US dollars by 2025, and the Chinese market will occupy nearly 30% of the global market share with a scale of 250 billion yuan, with an average annual compound growth rate of 11.6%. Behind this growth is the demand for technological iteration, where the penetration rate of new energy vehicles exceeds 50% and the penetration rate of L2+level intelligent driving systems exceeds 60%. As a global leader in the automotive semiconductor industry, NXP Semiconductors' initiatives have also received widespread attention from the industry.
However, NXP's gaze is not limited to the automotive aspect. Li Xiaohe pointed out, "We believe that in the next few years, China will see parallel and aggregated development of automobiles, humanoid robots, and low altitude economy. This is because the underlying technologies of these industries, such as functional safety, information security, and production and manufacturing supply chains, have many complementary aspects. The development speed of the robotics and low altitude economy fields will be faster than that of normal initial industries because they can be empowered by electric vehicles
The automotive industry and the industrial sector are also complementary. The degree of automation and intelligence in industrial manufacturing is increasing, and AI technology is being applied more and more. End side AI has penetrated into the industrial field, and many solutions are interconnected with the automotive industry, such as low power consumption, real-time performance, safety verification, functional safety, reliability, etc.
The related technologies will also extend into fields such as healthcare and smart homes. The demand for low-power technology in smart wearable devices is very high, and smart homes have a large demand for secure interconnection. In the future, more and more devices such as automobiles, home appliances, mobile phones, and smart wearables will be interconnected, forming a new ecosystem. Cars will surpass people's living rooms and offices, becoming the most technology intensive area with fixed time, fixed location. Automobiles, based on technologies such as new energy and high-performance computing, will integrate more scenarios such as health diagnosis and human-computer interaction, becoming people's second office, second smart home, and even recuperation places. And the underlying technologies for all of this are low power consumption, functional safety, system safety, real-time performance, and other technologies. There will be a lot of untapped space in the future.
Meanwhile, Li Xiaohe believes that in such a development process, the Chinese market will still be at the forefront. NXP will also integrate more deeply into the Chinese market, join forces with ecological partners, and jointly empower the industry.