Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進), a foundry service provider specializing in power management and display driver chips, yesterday said that its wafer shipment would grow up to 5 percent sequentially this quarter, driven by recovering demand in the communications, industrial and automotive sectors.
Factory utilization is also projected to improve, rising to between 75 and 80 percent — an increase of about 5 percent from the previous quarter, company president John Wei (尉濟時) told an online earnings call.
“As we have about three months of [order] visibility, we have higher on-hand orders for the second quarter compared with the first quarter. The third quarter will also be better than the second,” Wei said. “Given the effect of front-loading demand, we are carefully monitoring if such momentum will carry into the second half.”
Photo: Grace Hung, Taipei Times
Average selling prices this quarter are expected to remain flat or rise by up to 2 percent quarter-on-quarter, following a 5 percent decline last quarter, largely due to price competition, Wei said.
However, the company anticipates that a stronger New Taiwan dollar would weigh on its gross margin by about 3 percent, assuming the currency appreciates 6 percent quarter-on-quarter to NT$30.9 against the US dollar, Vanguard said.
Each 1 percent change in the NT dollar’s value affects gross margin by about 0.5 percent, it said.
As a result, the company expects its gross margin to decline to between 27 and 29 percent this quarter, down from 30.1 percent in the previous quarter.
Vanguard expects a more pronounced rebound in customer demand in its computing segment, particularly for chips used in servers, both with and without artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, as well as in high-performance computing devices and notebook computers, vice president Claire Chen (陳姿鈞) said.
About two-thirds of the company’s computing revenue last quarter came from power management chips used in AI servers and notebooks, Chen said.
The computing segment accounted for more than 20 percent of total revenue in the same period, she said.
Vanguard also said it would maintain its capital expenditure budget for this year at between NT$60 billion and NT$70 billion (US$1.98 billion to US$2.31 billion), with 90 percent of the funds allocated to its new 12-inch fab in Singapore, chief financial officer Amanda Huang (黃惠蘭) said.
The facility is on track to begin production in 2027.
Vanguard yesterday reported its strongest quarterly performance in nine quarters last quarter, with net profit rising 30.7 percent quarter-on-quarter to NT$2.41 billion, up from NT$1.85 billion in the previous quarter.
On an annual basis, net profit surged 89.8 percent from NT$1.27 billion.
Earnings per share increased to NT$1.30, compared with NT$1.03 in the prior quarter and NT$0.77 a year earlier.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
TRANSITION: With the closure, the company would reorganize its Taiwanese unit to a sales and service-focused model, Bridgestone said Bridgestone Corp yesterday announced it would cease manufacturing operations at its tire plant in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), affecting more than 500 workers. Bridgestone Taiwan Co (台灣普利司通) said in a statement that the decision was based on the Tokyo-based tire maker’s adjustments to its global operational strategy and long-term market development considerations. The Taiwanese unit would be reorganized as part of the closure, effective yesterday, and all related production activities would be concluded, the statement said. Under the plan, Bridgestone would continue to deepen its presence in the Taiwanese market, while transitioning to a sales and service-focused business model, it added. The Hsinchu
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has approved a capital budget of US$31.28 billion for production expansion to meet long-term development needs during the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. The company’s board meeting yesterday approved the capital appropriation plan for purposes such as the installation of advanced technology capacity and fab construction, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. At an earnings conference last month, TSMC forecast that its capital expenditure for this year would be at the higher end of the US$52 billion to US$56 billion range it forecast in January in response to robust demand for 5G, AI and
RSS