Hua Hong Semiconductor Limited (HHUSF)

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Hua Hong is paid a manufacturing fee per wafer processed, plus charges for mask sets and process development, rather than earning royalties on the chips it makes. Because fabs have high fixed costs from expensive equipment and cleanrooms, profitability depends heavily on capacity utilization — the plants ran at 106.1% utilization in 2025, among the highest in the industry. Revenue grew a fifth in 2025 as demand strengthened for its specialty process platforms, particularly analog and power management chips.

Building and qualifying a specialty-process wafer fab requires billions of dollars and years of process-engineering know-how that a new entrant cannot quickly replicate, giving established foundries like Hua Hong an advantage in mature and specialty nodes. The advantage is narrower than in cutting-edge logic manufacturing, where a small number of much larger foundries compete on more advanced technology.

Demand tracks the broader semiconductor cycle and the capital-spending plans of the fabless chip companies that are Hua Hong's customers, which can swing between shortage and oversupply within a few quarters. High fixed costs mean that when fab utilization falls, profitability falls faster than revenue, since a large share of costs continue regardless of how many wafers actually run through the plant.