Chipmakers raised their capacity utilization to the highest level in almost four years in the quarter ended June 30, industry figures showed.
Global chipmakers used 95.4 percent of their production capacity in the second quarter, the highest since the July-September quarter of 2000, according to the Semiconductor International Capacity Statistics.
The figures include production by 45 chipmakers from the US, Europe, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
Capacity utilization has risen for six straight quarters, today's second-quarter chipmaking figures showed.
Chipmakers produced the equivalent of 1.341 million 200-millimeter wafers a week in the second quarter, compared with maximum production capacity of 1.406 million wafers a week.
Semiconductor Equipment & Materials International said last week that orders to North American companies that sell equipment used to build semiconductors more than doubled in July from a year earlier.
Growth from a month earlier was the smallest in a year.
The book-to-bill ratio for North American chip-tool makers was 1.05 in July, indicating they received $105 in orders for every $100 in sales, the San Jose, California-based trade group said in a statement.
The book-to-bill ratio measures industry health and was revised to 1.07 in June, compared with 1.10 in May.
A ratio above 1 indicates growth in the sector.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS