Macronix International Co (旺宏電子), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory chipmaker, yesterday said that its net profit last quarter fell 18 percent from the previous quarter, while gross margin dipped due to a higher inventory write-off and increased shipments of lower-margin memory chips to Nintendo Co.
Net profit last quarter fell to NT$1.92 billion (US$62.04 million) from NT$2.33 billion in the third quarter of last year, with earnings per share of NT$1.05, down from NT$1.28 a quarter ago.
“The third-quarter net profit slightly lagged behind our expectations, as business from Nintendo was a bit lower” than expected, Macronix chairman and chief executive officer Miin Wu (吳敏求) told an investors’ teleconference.
Inventory, most of which were prepared for Nintendo for the holiday shopping season, last quarter spiked 20 percent to NT$17.16 billion from a quarter ago, the company’s financial statement showed.
Gross margin last quarter fell to 18 percent from 24 percent in the second quarter and from 20 percent in the third quarter of last year.
Macronix said it is in talks with Nintendo to digest the inventory.
The US-China trade dispute and the US sanction on China’s ZTE Corp (中興) have reduced NAND flash memory chip orders from China, the chipmaker said.
That has caused revenue to fall 4 percent year-on-year to NT$10.03 billion last quarter, it said.
“It is difficult to predict how the market will act, especially with the trade row between the US and China. It is impossible to know how the trade tension will play out,” Wu said.
Electronics assemblers have been seeing slowing production, as their clients are cautious about placing orders due to the trade dispute and a shortage of passive components, Wu said.
Most of the assemblers manufacture their products at Chinese plants before shipping them to the US, he said.
Despite unfavorable market conditions, Macronix expects prices for its high-density and high-quality NOR flash memory chips to remain stable this quarter and next year, given limited supply, Wu said.
Macronix expects its factory to be fully utilized this quarter.
The chipmaker said it plans to allocate NT$14.2 billion on new equipment next year to upgrade 36-nanometer technology to 19-nanometer technology to produce 19-nanometer single-level-cell NAND flash memory chips.
Part of the capital would be used to produce low-density embedded multimedia card NAND flash memory chips, and to finance the research and development of 3D NAND flash memory chips, the company said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS