China's Tsinghua Unigroup has readied CNY370 billion (US$58.74 billion) to support its semiconductor deployments in the next five years, and plans to inject up to US$100 billion into chipset production in 10 years, according to Zhao Weiguo, chairman of the group.

Zhao recently made a surprise move by quitting the chairmanships of two subsidiaries - Unisplendour and Unigroup Guoxin, triggering speculation about the group's strategy changes.

Zhao, who remains Tsinghua Unigroup chairman, reiterated the company's ambition to become a world-class IT group while speaking at the opening session of the 2018 China Information Technology Expo (CITE) on April 9.

Zhao said that Tsinghua Unigroup will develop into a group covering businesses from chip production to cloud services through both in-house innovations and international cooperation, and by enhancing combinations between corporate and national strategies, IT industries and commercial practices, and domestic market developments and cross-border operations.

He said that Tsinghua Unigroup aims to become a capital-, talent- and technology-intensive company that can provide fundamental technologies and products to support the entire Internet and new IT industries, and it can compete well with global rivals.

Zhao also revealed that the Yangtze Memory Technology under the group will start equipment move-in on April 11, and will soon kick off small-scale production of 32-layer 64G 3D NAND memory chips.

He continued that through acquisitions, Tsinghua Unigroup has commanded a 27% global market share in the baseband, Wi-Fi, and power amplifier SoCs for smartphones, and has ranked as China's No.1 supplier of national IC card chips, financial card chips, SIM card chips, FPGAs, dedicated CPUs, specific DRAM and IoT chips.

In addition, Tsinghua Unigroup is also moving to build its own storage chip industry ecosystem through acquiring stakes in China's H3C, a major supplier of new IT solutions. In this aspect, the group is focusing its deployments on mobile connection, Internet and cloud services - the three fastest growing outlets for storage chips.

In the first half of 2018, the group will also launch public cloud services with a focus on the B2B sector with total investment of CNY12 billion, according to Zhao.