Macronix International Co (旺宏電子), the world’s No. 2 NOR flash memorychip maker, yesterday said clients are queuing for its products amid a supply shortage.
The company has a rosy outlook for the NOR flash market for the next two years as new applications boost demand, Macronix chairman Miin Wu (吳敏求) told a news conference.
“The gap between supply and demand is becoming larger as demand continues to climb,” Wu said.
Robust demand also reflects on quick digestion of inventory, with NT$7 billion (US$229 million) worth of inventory cleared in less than three months, Macronix said.
The Hsinchu-based company usually keeps an inventory of semi-finished chips worth between NT$7 billion and NT$10 billion a quarter, Wu said.
Growing demand will cap the inventory at a very low level throughout this year, he said.
There is uncertainty about supplies amid speculation that US-based Micron Technology plans to withdraw from the NOR flash market, Wu said.
“Clients have been knocking on our doors” for more supplies, he said.
Supply constraints helped boost the prices of NOR flash chips by 5 to 10 percent since the beginning of this year, Macronix said.
The trend is likely to continue this year, it said last month.
NOR flash sales have generated 64 percent of the company’s revenue in last quarter, with most of the chips used in consumer electronics, it said.
“We are seeing a lot of new business opportunities,” Wu said, adding that the chips can be used in a wide range of electronics applications to enhance their performance.
For example, smartphone makers have substituted embedded flash with NOR flash chips, which enhance color performance, for use in flagship models’ OLED panels, he said.
NOR flash chips are also increasingly being used in Internet of Things devices and microcontrollers, he said.
These three applications are projected to each consume 100 million units of NOR flash chips per year, he said.
Although improving demand is expected to push Macronix’s factory utilization to about 100 percent this year, the chipmaker does not plan to boost capacity yet as it only became profitable in the second half of last year.
It will take about NT$40 billion to boost its advanced 12-inch fab to full capacity of 50,000 wafers a year, Macronix said, adding that it has only installed half of that, or about 20,000 wafers a year.
The firm also operates a 6-inch fab and an 8-inch fab in Hsinchu.
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