Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電) yesterday said demand for its tailor-made DRAM and NOR flash memory chips is expected to significantly pick up in the second half of this year.
The company’s new 3D memory product, dubbed CUBE, is expected to generate meaningful revenue next year, the Taichung company told an earnings conference.
The CUBE product, which is designed to stack a logic chip upon a memory chip, is cost-efficient and suitable for artificial intelligence (AI) devices with less computing power, Winbond president James Chen (陳沛銘) said.
Photo: Grace Hung, Taipei Times
The company aims to offer the product to dozens of customers, he said.
“Since DeepSeek (深度求索) launched its AI models during the Lunar New Year holiday, we have received numerous inquiries about our CUBE product,” he said.
Some analysts consider CUBE a low-density version of high-bandwidth memory chips that are used in AI devices with powerful training and inferencing abilities.
While Winbond is positive about the second half of this year, it remains precarious about overall market demand, given uncertainties related to geopolitical conflicts and US tariff threats, the company said.
“The fourth quarter last year was the trough of the year and the situation will be much better going forward,” Chen said. “In the customized DRAM segment, we are seeing strong indicators that point to a recovery” in demand.
The recovery in the communications segment, smartphones in particular, would buoy DRAM demand in the third and fourth quarters, he said.
The communications segment accounted for 24 percent of Winbond’s revenue last year, down from 25 percent in 2023 and more than 30 percent in previous years, he said.
Demand for DRAM chips used in TVs and automotive devices looks healthy, and demand for NOR flash chips used in servers appears strong, while demand for other applications such as notebook computers, smart home devices and vehicles seems stable, he said.
As multiple manufacturers exit the market, single-layer-cell NAND flash memory chips would become tight in the second half of next year, he added.
Overall, Winbond’s factory utilization rate would bounce back to nearly 100 percent this year, up from more than 80 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, he said.
Winbond reported net profit of NT$601 million (US$18.35 million) last year, compared with a net loss of NT$1.15 billion in 2023.
While the company’s earnings per share were NT$0.14, its board of directors decided not to distribute cash dividends to shareholders, it said.
Revenue last year rose 8.8 percent to NT$81.61 billion from NT$75 billion in 2023.
The chipmaker plans to spend NT$5.3 billion in new facilities and equipment this year, down about 66 percent from NT$15.5 billion last year.
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