Tsinghua Unigroup: Tsinghua Unigroup names telecoms industry veteran as new chairman of mobile chip design unit

Tsinghua Unigroup, which was rescued from bankruptcy a year ago, has named a new chairman for Unisoc, its mobile phone chip unit seen as China's best hope in the segment after Huawei Technologies Co's retreat due to US sanctions. Unigroup said in a statement on Tuesday that group executive vice-president Ma Daojie was appointed chairman and board member of its privately-held chip design subsidiary Unisoc. Unisoc's incumbent chairman Wu Shengwu, who was hand-picked by now disgraced former head of Unigroup Zhao Weiguo in 2022, will step down and be appointed to another role later, the statement added, without elaborating. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge , our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. The change marks another reshuffle of Unisoc's top brass, which saw CEO Steven Chu Qing step down in March 2022, replaced by Ren Qiwei, Unisoc's current CEO. Unigroup said Ma's "resourcefulness" in the mobile communications industry will play a "positive role" in promoting the future development of Unisoc. Tsinghua Unigroup completed a year-long debt-restructuring process in July 2022, after a private equity consortium led by state-backed Wise Road Capital bought 100 per cent of Unigroup's equity from its shareholders Tsinghua Holdings and Beijing Jiankun Investment Group, ending a high-stakes battle to keep afloat one of the nation's major semiconductor operations. Unisoc, which focuses on semiconductors for mobile applications, is seen as China's best hope in this market after Huawei's in-house chip design unit was crippled by US sanctions. Privately-held Unisoc and sanctions-hit Yangtze Memory Technologies Group are two crucial chip firms under the Unigroup umbrella. Ma, who has been chairman and president of Shenzhen-listed chip designer Guoxin Micron since December 2017, has 30 years of experience in China's mobile communications industry, including key managerial roles at China's state-owned telcos China Mobile and China Telecoms, according to the Unigroup statement. Unisoc is expected to see a slight increase in shipments in the second quarter thanks to its increased market share in chips for the LTE wireless data transmission market , according to a note by Counterpoint. Unisoc holds about 8 per cent of the global smartphone application processor market, ranking No 4 after MediaTek, Qualcomm and Apple. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) , the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.