The board of management of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufac-turing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday approved US$190.1 million in capital expenditures for factory expansion, the company said in a statement.
The funds are expected to be used to upgrade the chipmaker's six-inch and eight-inch wafer capacities in Hsinchu, the statement said.
TSMC, the world's biggest supplier of made-to-order chips, also said its board approved an increase of investment not exceeding US$27 million in VisEra Technologies Inc (采鈺科技) to participate in a secondary offer by VisEra in proportion with TSMC's current stake in the company.
VisEra was created in 2003 as a spin-off from TSMC with investment from image sensor partners. The image sensor foundry provider is currently chaired by Chiang Shang-yi (
Meanwhile, TSMC's board approved ex-post purchase of 989,000 shares of Global Unichip Corp (創意電子), a system-on-chip design foundry and close partner of TSMC, made during participation in an over-allotment sale where TSMC helped stabilize the stock price of Global Unichip, the statement said.
Separately, rival United Microelectronics Corp (UMC) said yesterday that its revenue for last month rose by 30 percent from the same month last year. Revenue totaled NT$9.2 billion (US$280.4 million) last month, compared to NT$7.07 billion in July last year, the company said in a statement, without elaborating.
UMC reported revenue of NT$59.34 billion for the January-July period, up 27 percent from NT$46.79 billion in the same period last year.
Kenneth Lee, an analyst at Primasia Securities, said last month's sales figure were in line with the company's predictions.
Last week, UMC said its net profit for the April-June period was NT$6.05 billion, up from NT$299 million in the second quarter of last year.
The company's second-quarter revenue rose 32 percent to NT$25.75 billion from NT$19.44 billion in the year-earlier period.
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts