Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技), the world’s fourth-largest DRAM chipmaker, yesterday posted its smallest quarterly loss since the second quarter of last year as gross margin returned to positive territory for the first time in six quarters, driven by improvements in chip prices.
Losses narrowed to NT$813 million (US$24.95 million) during the quarter ended on June 30, compared with losses of NT$1.21 billion in the previous quarter. On an annual basis, losses widened from NT$771 billion.
Gross margin improved to 2.9 percent, compared with minus-2.9 percent in the first quarter and minus-11.2 percent in the second quarter last year.
Photo: Grace Hung, Taipei Times
Nanya Technology said it would have nearly broke even last quarter, if not for the effects of a massive earthquake in April that led to the company incurring about NT$657 million in damage.
Nanya president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) said the company might be able to post a profit this quarter, thanks to improving DDR4 inventory and better average selling prices, following a sequential increase of 12 to 13 percent last quarter.
Earlier this week, TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) predicted that DRAM prices would increase 8 to 13 percent this quarter from a quarter earlier.
The company’s shipments are expected to return to growth this quarter after dropping 5 percent sequentially last quarter, Lee said.
Shipments for the whole of this year are expected to grow 20 percent, given a lower comparison base last year, he said.
As the world’s three major memorychip makers race to produce high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips and DDR5 modules used in artificial intelligence servers or high-end servers, the companies would produce fewer DDR4 chips, which would benefit Nanya Technology, he said.
However, economic slowdowns in China and Europe, along with geopolitical tensions, would continue to affect the use of DRAM chips used in PCs, smartphones and consumer electronics, Lee said.
China, alone, purchases about 40 percent of mobile DRAM, he said.
Nanya Technology has no plans to produce HBM chips in the short term, as the company’s strategy is to tap the DDR5 market first, he said.
DDR5 chips are also used in high-end cloud-computing devices and PCs, the company said.
The company plans to roll out its first DDR5 modules with 16-gigabit capacity in the second half of this year, with estimated sales contribution reaching about 10 percent of its monthly revenue, Lee said.
Nanya Technology has resumed full production on its chip lines and does not expect a strike by Samsung Electronics Co workers to affect supply and demand in the market, he said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS