With business prospects looking up, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday it would give employees a half-month bonus to thank them for their hard work.
This will be the second time after July that the world’s largest contract chipmaker would be distributing bonuses to reflect its improving business.
“We offered a half-month salary as a bonus in July. That’s for the second quarter [performance], and now, because the third-quarter performance was also pretty good, we will again award each employee with half a month’s pay,” TSMC chairman Morris Chang (張忠謀) said at the company’s annual sports event in Hsinchu yesterday.
The half-month pay will cost the company a total of NT$460 million (US$14.2 million), Chang said.
He said he expected the company to post record revenues next year as he had become more optimistic about the outlook for the global economy and semiconductor industry, ditching a rather pessimistic view he gave earlier this year.
“We are not only expecting TSMC to return to 2008’s performance next year, but also to exceed 2008 and post record revenues,” Chang said.
TSMC reported NT$321.8 billion in revenues last year, up 2.6 percent from a year earlier. In the first nine months of the year, sales totaled NT$203.65 billion, down 24.2 percent year-on-year, it said on Oct. 9.
Citigroup expects TSMC to post revenues of NT$290.85 billion this year and NT$326.61 billion next year, citing the chipmaker’s ability to ramp up 40 and 45-nanometer technology in chip production to take market share back from its competitors, analyst Andrew Lu (陸行之) said in a report on Oct. 7.
Chang also said he expected the global economy and the semiconductor sector to recover to last year’s levels by 2011 — one year earlier than his previous forecast.
On July 30, Chang told investors he expected the semiconductor industry to shrink by 17 percent this year.
Chang kept mum though on whether the company would end a salary freeze the company implemented earlier this year because of the global financial crisis. He said only TSMC was reviewing salary structures, as well as its organization structure.
As for the new entrant Global Foundries, a joint venture between chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Investment Co, Chang said TSMC was closely monitoring Global Foundries’ attempt to acquire Singapore’s Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd (特He said he has confidence in TSMC’s competitiveness, given its stronger manufacturing and customer partnership, in addition to advanced technology.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY LISA WANG AND HUNG YU-FANG
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