Taiwan Semiconductor Manufact-uring Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world's largest custom-chip maker, said it expects the company's Shanghai plant to become profitable this year, three years after starting production.
"We'll be increasing the capacity of the Shanghai fab this year from 34,000 wafers per month, and expect it to turn profitable in the second half," TSMC spokeman Tzeng Jinn-haw (曾晉皓) said yesterday.
Tzeng declined to give details of production targets, or what products are made at the factory, or to identify customers.
On April 26, TSMC's chief executive Rick Tsai (蔡力行) said at an investors conference that the company's US$898 million Shanghai plant would break even in the second half of this year after around three-year operation.
"There is no bottleneck in the Shanghai factory's operation," Tsai said in response to an investor's question. "If there were any, there would be a slow transfer of [advanced] technologies," Tsai said at the time.
TSMC's Chinese plant will make up less than five percent of the company's total production this year, according to the chipmaker's forecast.
TSMC recently started making 8-inch wafers in China using relatively advanced 0.18-micron processing technology -- as opposed to the previously used 0.25-micron technology it used -- after receiving approval from the Taiwanese government at the end of last year.
The Shanghai plant is expected to make 34,000 8-inch wafers a month by the end of this year from the 30,000 wafers it now produces, Tsai said on April 26.
TSMC is the sole Taiwan chipmaker operating a Chinese plant. Computer memory chipmaker ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德科技) will be the second one after it obtained approval earlier this year. ProMOS is scheduled to ramp up its Chinese factory by the end of next year.
The Shanghai plant had installed capacity to produce 90,000 8-inch wafers during the first quarter, TSMC said last month in a statement on its Web site. Capacity may rise to 94,000 wafers in the second quarter, 98,000 wafers in the third, and 101,000 in the fourth, it said.
The plant's annual capacity for 8-inch wafers may rise to 383,000 at the end of this year, from 262,000 last year, the company said.
Chip sales in China, the world's biggest semiconductor market, may almost triple to US$111 billion in 2011 from US$39 billion in 2005 as it manufactures more mobile phones, computers and digital music players, research company IC Insights Inc said.
China may produce 29 percent of the world's consumer electronics in 2010, rising from 20 percent in 2005, researcher Gartner Inc said.
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