Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is to replace Samsung Electronics Co as the world’s largest chip company by revenue this quarter, market researcher IC Insights said yesterday.
TSMC, the world’s biggest foundry services provider, is expected to post a quarterly revenue increase of 11 percent to US$20.2 billion, while Samsung’s revenue is forecast to fall 19 percent to US$18.29 billion due to a slump in the memorychip industry, IC Insights said.
TSMC has said its revenue would be US$19.8 billion to US$20.6 billion this quarter.
Photo: Reuters
Intel Corp is expected to rank third with revenue likely to be US$15.04 billion, up 1 percent from last quarter, but 26 percent lower than TSMC’s, IC Insights said, noting “the swiftness of TSMC’s rise to the top” from the third spot last year.
Citing the memorychip industry’s downturn, IC Insights cut its worldwide IC market growth forecast for this year to an annual increase of 7 percent, from its earlier estimate of 11 percent.
“The downgraded expectation for this year is almost entirely due to the collapse of the memory market in the second half of 2022,” it said. “It was as though someone flipped a switch to the off position for the memory market beginning in June.”
Memorychip makers have attributed the downturn to inventory adjustments by customers, and many chip companies expect the adjustment to extend into at least early next year, IC Insights said.
Early this month, Samsung co-CEO Kyung Kye-hyun, who heads the company’s semiconductor unit, said the second half of this year looks bad.
Similarly, Micron Technology Inc and Western Digital Corp forecast quarterly revenue declines of 17 percent and 18 percent this quarter respectively, citing sharp inventory corrections, IC Insights said.
Separately, TSMC, the sole chip supplier to Apple Inc’s iPhone series, yesterday reported a record revenue of NT$218.13 billion (US$7.06 billion) last month, up 16.8 percent month-on-month and 58.7 percent year-on-year.
Cumulative revenue totaled NT$1.43 trillion in the first eight months of this year, up 43.5 percent from NT$996.54 billion in the same period last year, TSMC said.
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