China’s semiconductor equipment race had a massive 2025, but the most interesting part for us in this region is that Malaysia and Singapore are right in the middle of the story.
According to a Nikkei Asia analysis cited by Tom’s Hardware, Chinese chip equipment companies including Naura, AMEC, ACM Research, and Piotech all posted record revenues in 2025. At the same time, Chinese fabs were importing record volumes of U.S.-branded chipmaking tools through Singapore and Malaysia, while direct imports from the U.S. dropped sharply.
That matters because it shows two things happening at once. First, China’s domestic wafer fab equipment industry is still growing fast as Beijing pushes to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers. Second, overseas tools are clearly still a major part of the picture, even if the shipping routes and paperwork trail look very different now.
Naura, which Nikkei says has the broadest product lineup among the four companies, reported 27.14 billion yuan in revenue in just the first three quarters of 2025. For comparison, it made 6.05 billion yuan for all of 2020. AMEC also grew to more than five times its 2020 revenue base over the same period, while Piotech’s 2025 revenue was roughly 13 times its 2020 total.
So yes, the growth is real. It also lines up with the big capacity expansion push among major Chinese chipmakers like YMTC, CXMT, and SMIC.
But it is not all easy money.
Needham & Co. analyst Charles Shi told Nikkei Asia that while top Chinese equipment makers are still growing strongly, their margins are starting to weaken. The reason is pretty straightforward: competition inside China is getting more aggressive, with domestic vendors cutting prices to win business that used to go to U.S., Japanese, and Dutch suppliers.
The trade flow numbers are where Malaysia and Singapore come in.
Chinese customs data showed just $2 billion in direct U.S.-origin shipments in 2025. That was down more than 34% year over year, and it was the lowest annual figure since 2017. Meanwhile, imports traced to Singapore reached $5.7 billion, up more than 17% year over year. Shipments traced to Malaysia more than doubled to $3.4 billion.
Even those numbers do not tell the full story. Tom’s Hardware notes that Applied Materials, Lam, and KLA together booked nearly $19 billion in China sales across their fiscal 2025 reporting periods, and each company got more than 30% of total revenue from China. ASML’s China revenue share was 29.1% in 2025, down from 36% in 2024. On top of that, China’s cumulative imports from Japan between 2020 and 2025 exceeded $42 billion, while shipments from the Netherlands added roughly $35 billion.
For Malaysia and the wider SEA tech scene, this is the real takeaway: our region is not sitting on the sidelines. Malaysia and Singapore are now clearly part of the semiconductor equipment supply-chain conversation, and that means any future crackdown or tighter export controls could bring more scrutiny here too.
Washington is already moving in that direction. The new MATCH Act is the latest U.S. legislative push aimed at closing Southeast Asian routing paths to China. The bill targets both finished tools and chokepoint components, and specifically names Chinese companies including CXMT, YMTC, SMIC, and Hua Hong. For now, though, governments in Europe and Japan have not publicly matched that scope.
For Malaysian readers, this is one of those stories that feels far away until you realise our name is literally in the trade data. If chip controls tighten further, the impact will not just be on China and the U.S. Southeast Asia could end up facing more compliance pressure, more attention on cross-border shipments, and a bigger role in how the global chip supply chain gets redrawn.
Source: Tom's Hardware