(Yicai Global) Aug. 7 -- Tsinghua Unigroup, China's leading state-owned chipmaker, has dismissed speculation that it plans to buy German counterpart Siltronic, one of the world's top semiconductor manufacturers.

"It is a mere rumor with no factual basis," the company said yesterday in a statement on its official WeChat account.

Siltronic has a 13 percent share of the global wafer silicon wafer market, making it the world's fourth-largest producer. It has three production lines in Germany, two in Singapore and one factory in the United States, which the company claims allow it to produce one wafer every second. Asia is one of the largest markets for the firm, and it ranks tech giants Samsung and Toshiba among its clients.

International mergers between Europe and Asia are not a good idea right now, Gu Wenjun, chief analyst at semiconductor industry researcher ICWise, told National Business Daily. Technological breakthroughs at home are more important, he added.

Talk of the deal comes as two Chinese firms had potential acquisitions in Germany shot down by the local government. Federal authorities blocked Taihai Group's plan to buy machine maker Leifield on Aug. 1, marking the first merger veto in line with new rules brought in last year, and empowered policy bank KfW to take a 20 percent stake in power grid operator 50Hertz, blocking a planned takeover by China Grid.

Chinese companies have bought fewer German assets since hitting a historic peak in 2016, according to data from PricewaterhouseCoopers. They had bought just seven German firms as of the end of May, down from a year earlier.

Editor: James Boynton