Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported a third straight quarter of record sales, underscoring its lead as the world’s No. 1 maker of advanced chips, which are in short supply.
Taiwan’s largest company said that first-quarter revenue climbed 16.7 percent to NT$362.41 billion (US$12.74 billion), compared with the average NT$360.5 billion of analysts’ estimates.
TSMC in the middle of January said that its revenue for the three-month period was expected to range from US$12.7 billion to US$13 billion after the estimate was converted into a range of NT$354.97 billion to NT$363.35, based on the average exchange rate of NT$27.95 at the time.
Photo: Billy H.C. Kwok, Bloomberg
The strong showing in the first quarter came after TSMC smashed its records by posting NT$129.13 billion in sales last month, up 21.2 percent from a month earlier and 13.7 percent from a year earlier.
TSMC has kept its fabs running at “over 100 percent utilization” over the past year, chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told clients in a letter recently.
The company — already planning capital spending of as much as US$28 billion this year — plans to invest US$100 billion over the next three years to expand its capacity, he said.
“TSMC is investing aggressively to capture the structural and fundamental increase in underlying demand driven by long-term growth megatrends from 5G and high-performance computing,” Citigroup Inc analyst Roland Shu (徐振志) wrote in a note.
The spending target implies that TSMC’s revenue could reach as much as US$95.1 billion in 2024 and the firm “is on the march to be the largest semiconductor company by revenue in 2024-2025,” Shu said.
TSMC has scheduled an investors’ conference on Thursday next week to detail its first-quarter results and give guidance for the second quarter, as well as for the whole of this year.
Analysts said that the company’s sales growth momentum would continue with production capacity fully utilized.
As Taiwan faces a serious water shortage, analysts said that the market wants to know how the lack of water would affect TSMC’s operating costs.
Like other tech firms, TSMC has begun buying water by the truckload to meet demand.
Additional reporting by CNA
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”