Macronix International Co (旺宏電子) yesterday said that stronger-than-expected demand for memory chips from its top client, Nintendo Co, and other new products would fuel growth momentum in the second half of this year, shrugging off the effects of the US-China trade row.
US trade sanctions on Huawei Technologies Co (華為) would barely dent the chipmaker’s shipments to the Chinese company, Macronix said.
The US ban has taken a toll on Huawei, causing its smartphone sales to drop 40 percent over the past month and could cut its revenue by US$30 billion in the next two years, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei (任正非) told a panel discussion in Shenzhen, China, on Monday.
“Fortunately, we produce very few memory chips for mobile phones,” Macronix chairman Miin Wu (吳敏求) told reporters on the sidelines of the company’s annual general meeting, implying limited impact from the Huawei ban.
While Huawei is one of the Hsinchu-based chipmaker’s top three clients, it accounts for less than 10 percent of its revenue, Wu said.
Macronix primarily supplies NOR flash memory chips used in Huawei’s 5G base stations, he said.
As global trade becomes chaotic due to the trade spat, Macronix is more cautious about the outlook for the second half, Wu said.
“It is certain that the second half would be better than the first half. However, we are not so sure how robust the strength would be,” Wu said, referring to the trade dispute, which has shaken global business confidence and reduced Macronix’s order visibility.
Two months ago, Wu anticipated that the dispute would be over by the end of this month.
However, now, the chances of the world’s two biggest economies resolving the dispute looks slim, he said.
“As uncertainty is high, clients tend to place short-term orders, rather than long-term ones. That makes it difficult for us to make forecasts,” Wu said.
However, orders from long-term client Nintendo “has exceeded our expectations in the past two months,” he said. “Demand is better than we thought.”
Nintendo’s strong demand for ROM memory chips helped boost Macronix’s revenue to NT$2.72 billion (US$86.27 million) last month, up 30 percent from April.
“That is very unusual, as the first and second quarters are usually slow seasons,” Wu said.
To further fuel growth, Macronix plans to mass produce advanced 19-nanometer NAND flash memory chips in the fourth quarter, he said.
The chipmaker has budgeted NT$14.2 billion for new facilities and equipment this year, mostly for 19-nanometer technology.
Shareholders approved a plan to distribute a cash dividend of NT$1.2 per share, representing a 40.49 percent payout ratio based on earnings per share of NT$4.94 last year. That implies a dividend yield of 5.57 percent, based on the stock’s closing price of NT$21.55 yesterday.
This week’s undoing of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and its sister token, Luna, has ramifications for all of crypto. First, there is the immediate impact: The rapid collapse of a once-popular pair of cryptocurrencies sent a ripple effect across the industry, contributing to plummeting coin prices that wiped hundreds of billions of market value from the digital-asset market and stoked worries over the potential fragility of digital-asset ventures. Then there are the knock-on effects. In addition to delivering punishing losses to individual users and investment firms, the spectacular failure of a market darling like Terra threatens to have a cooling effect
China’s biggest chipmaker has cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC, 中芯) estimates a month-long lockdown in Shanghai could spur component shortages and logistics tangles, and erase about 5 percent of its output in the second quarter. “We are trying our best to mitigate the impact on product delivery,” SMIC Chairman Gao Yonggang (高永崗) told analysts on a call yesterday morning. “We are still assessing the actual impact as many suppliers restart their
DISRUPTIONS: The war in Ukraine, China’s lockdown measures, rising interest rates and inflation have thrown a wrench into business plans made years in advance Samsung Electronics Co is talking with foundry clients about charging as much as 20 percent more for making semiconductors this year, joining an industry-wide push to hike prices to cover rising costs of materials and logistics. Contract-based chip prices are likely to rise around 15 percent to 20 percent, depending upon the level of sophistication, people familiar with the matter said. Chips produced on legacy nodes would face bigger price hikes, while new pricing would be applied from the second half of this year, they said, adding that Samsung has finished negotiating with some clients and is in discussions with others. Samsung’s decision
material SHORTAGE: Even as workers are about to return, Quanta lacks operating supplies, while Pegatron reported its lowest revenues in 11 quarters, the companies said Taiwan’s major Apple Inc supplier cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing China’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), which assembles MacBooks, expects a 20 percent quarterly fall in notebook shipments and a squeeze on margins this quarter due to the lockdown, a company representative said on Friday during an earnings call. The impact from supply chain disruptions could last until the end of the year, she said. The company’s Shanghai factory has been operating under tight restrictions since the middle of last month,
RSS