The world's second-largest manufacturer of chips to order, United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), plans to spend more than US$2 billion on new equipment this year, well ahead of investor forecasts and three times what it spent last year.
At an investors meeting yesterday, the company also announced NT$6.7 billion in profits for the final three months of last year, almost seven times the NT$986 million earned in the same period in 2002.
The equipment plan indicates UMC is in for a bumper year, analysts said.
"UMC's capital expenditure figure for 2004 was well above my expectations of US$1.5 billion," said George Wu (
The reason for the increase is that Hsinchu-based UMC has been successful in attracting more foreign customers, Wu said.
"It has been confirmed in the industry that hotel rooms are very hard to book in Hsinchu as UMC's overseas clients come to Taiwan to visit the company," Wu said. "They are so aggressive on capital expenditure that these clients must have made promises of good orders."
Of the US$2.12 billion UMC plans to spend on new equipment this year, US$850 million is expected to go to UMCi Pte Ltd, a subsidiary set up in partnership with German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG and the Singaporean government, the company said.
The plant makes disks of silicon, or wafers, measuring 12 inches in diameter, from which chips are cut.
News of the scale of expansion in Singapore surprised investors.
"The expenditure in UMC's Taiwan plants is in line with my expectations, but I was surprised by the UMCi figure," said Chris Hsieh (
A company official said the investment was needed to take the Singapore fab from scratch to mass production.
"We are ramping up our 12-inch fab in Singapore from zero to 10,000 wafers per month, so that is why we plan to spend US$850 million there this year," vice chairman Peter Chang (張崇德) said.
The 12-inch fab is also able to produce denser chips with more transistors per square centimeter of silicon.
The most advanced chips with transistors measuring only 90 nanometers across will account for 4 percent of the company's revenue this year from zero last year, UMC chief executive Jackson Hu (胡國強) said yesterday.
Hu gave investors more positive news when he said that he would be able to increase slightly UMC's chip prices this quarter.
"The average selling price will increase by low single-digit percentage points as we are fully loaded at present and demand is strong," he said.
UMC's fabs are expected to run at full capacity this quarter, Hu said.
While UMC expands, some orders beyond capacity could be passed to its Chinese partner He Jian Technology (Suzhou) Co (
Taiwan Semiconductor Manu-facturing Co (TSMC,
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day