DRAM chipmaker Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday saw last month’s revenue climb to a record high as the company offered a bulked-up, more cost-effective 20-nanometer chip to satisfy robust customer demand.
The gain marked the third consecutive month that the chipmaker broke a company record, as it benefits from the longest boom period for the DRAM industry since the second half of 2016.
Revenue last month rose 3.12 percent to NT$8.59 billion (US$280.85 million), compared with NT$8.33 billion in May and NT$4.19 billion in June last year, bringing second-quarter revenue up 30.85 percent to NT$24.6 billion from NT$18.8 billion in the first quarter, a company statement said.
Planning to convert more chips from 30 nanometer to 20 nanometer technology and to sell more of the higher-priced DDR4 chips, Nanya Technology expects second-quarter shipments to grow at a quarterly rate of 15 percent from the first quarter.
DDR4 chips deliver 20 to 30 percent more of a price premium than the DDR3 chips, the company said, adding that it expects shipments this year to increase 48 percent year-on-year.
The revenue growth was also supported by constant price increases. DRAM chip prices have been increasing since the second half of 2016 due to a supply crunch, although price increases are slowing.
The average selling price during the second quarter was expected to increase by a low-to-middle single digit percentage as demand continued to outpace supply, following a 6.1 percent price increase in the first quarter, Nanya Technology said in May.
The price uptrend is expected to carry into the current quarter, driven by seasonal demand for DRAM chips used in servers and mobile phones, the chipmaker projected at the time.
In particular, most high-end smartphones are to be equipped with bigger memory of about 6 gigabytes, Nanya Technology said.
Increasing replacement demand for entry-level smartphones in developing countries such as India and Indonesia would also spur demand for memory chips, it said.
In the first six months of this year, revenue soared 74.56 percent to NT$43.39 billion, compared with NT$24.86 billion during the same period last year, it said.
About 65 percent of the chipmaker’s revenue came from niche DRAM chips for consumer electronics such as TVs, while 15 percent came from low-power DRAM chips for mobile phones and about 10 percent from PC DRAM chips, it said.
Shares in Nanya Technology yesterday inched up 0.99 percent to close at NT$81.8 in Taipei trading.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS