Producer
Siltronic AG
German silicon wafer company (Frankfurt Stock Exchange: WAF, HQ Munich; ~€1.9B revenue; Wacker Chemie spun off 2015); world's 3rd or 4th-largest 300mm silicon wafer producer with manufacturing in Germany (Burghausen, Freiberg), Singapore, and Portland Oregon USA. Siltronic supplies polished and epitaxial silicon wafers to TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and other major chipmakers. Siltronic's parent Wacker Chemie sold its majority stake in 2015 IPO; Wacker retains a minority. In January 2022, Germany's federal government blocked GlobalWafers' (Taiwan) €4.35B acquisition of Siltronic, citing strategic industry concerns — specifically that allowing a Taiwanese company to control the only significant German silicon wafer manufacturer would create national security and supply chain risks for European semiconductor manufacturing. The blocking of the GlobalWafers/Siltronic deal was one of the first major examples of EU/German semiconductor supply chain protectionism, preceding the European Chips Act.
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300mm Polished & Epitaxial Silicon Wafers
70%200mm and Smaller Silicon Wafers
25%Specialty Silicon Products
5%
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Incident2022
In January 2022, the German federal government blocked GlobalWafers Co., Ltd. (Taiwan) from completing its €4.35 billion acquisition of Siltronic AG (Munich) — a transaction that had received shareholder approval and antitrust clearance in multiple jurisdictions. Germany's Ministry for Economic Affairs cited strategic concerns under the German Foreign Trade and Payments Act (Außenwirtschaftsgesetz), specifically that foreign control of Siltronic — the only significant German manufacturer of silicon wafers — posed risks to European semiconductor supply chain sovereignty. The blocking of GlobalWafers/Siltronic was one of the most high-profile examples of a Western government intervening to prevent the acquisition of a strategic semiconductor material supplier by a Taiwanese (and thus potentially China-adjacent) buyer. Germany's action preceded the EU Chips Act (2023), which committed €43B to strengthen European semiconductor supply chains. Siltronic remained independent with Wacker Chemie as a significant minority holder; GlobalWafers turned to organic capacity expansion in Taiwan and elsewhere. The same silicon wafer company that Germany protected from foreign acquisition in 2022 supplies polished wafers to TSMC — the Taiwanese foundry that Germany's intervention had partially sought to reduce dependence on.
German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs ↗Origin2023
Siltronic AG traces to Wacker Chemie's semiconductor materials business, which Wacker built starting in the 1950s when Alexander Wacker's chemical company identified silicon crystal growing as a strategic competency. Wacker Chemie had developed expertise in hyperpure polysilicon production (via the Siemens process — chemical vapor deposition of trichlorosilane) and extended this into pulling silicon single-crystal ingots (Czochralski process) and slicing them into polished wafers. For 60 years, the silicon wafer business operated as a division of Wacker Chemie; Wacker listed Siltronic as a separate company on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2015, retaining a significant minority stake. The Siltronic spin-off allowed Wacker's hyperpure polysilicon business (which supplies both semiconductor wafer makers and solar photovoltaic manufacturers) to be separately valued from the wafer slicing and polishing business — two steps of the same silicon supply chain separated into two listed companies.
Siltronic AG ↗