DRAM chipmaker Nanya Technology Corp’s (南亞科技) losses widened in the second quarter due to foreign-exchange losses and lower chip prices, but the company expects a pickup in demand to help it return to profit in the fourth quarter at the earliest.
Foreign-exchange losses of NT$1.12 billion (US$38.3 million) in the second quarter due to the New Taiwan dollar’s sharp rise against the greenback contributed 25 percent to the company’s net losses of NT$4.11 billion, the chipmaker said yesterday.
Second-quarter losses were larger than the losses of NT$1.94 billion in the first quarter and marked the 11th consecutive money-losing quarter, it said.
Photo: Grace Hung, Taipei Times
Average selling prices dipped about 5 percent sequentially or 15 percent annually in the second quarter, although shipments soared about 70 percent sequentially or 30 percent annually, the company said.
“We are positive about [memorychip] pricing in the second half,” Nanya president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a virtual media briefing yesterday.
The prices of DRAM chips used in non-artificial intelligence (AI) applications started to pick up last month, as supply and demand reached parity, and the uptrend is likely to extend into the second half, Lee said.
Non-AI DRAM chips account for 90 percent of the total DRAM market, he said.
“Price negotiations for the third quarter have gone very smoothly,” Lee said. “It is highly likely that Nanya would start to eke out a profit in the fourth quarter, rather than in the third quarter.”
Gross margin is likely to return to positive territory in the third quarter, from minus-20.6 percent in the second quarter, the company said.
Factory utilization rate has reached 100 percent, and the company is boosting production of DDR4 and low-power DDR4 DRAM chips in response to rising demand, it said.
The company continues to produce DDR4 and low-power DDR4 DRAM memory chips, with DDR4 DRAM accounting for more than half of its total production, while major global players are allocating more capacity to produce high-bandwidth memory or DDR5 DRAM chips to cope with booming demand for AI servers, it said.
Nanya said it is leveraging its second-generation 10-nanometer process technology to produce some low-power DDR5 DRAM chips, DDR4 and low-power DDR4 DRAM chips.
Regarding the impact of looming US tariffs on Taiwan, the company said that customers have not acted proactively and it expects limited impact from the potential US duties on semiconductors.
Manufacturers of logic chips would face a greater tariff impact than memorychip makers, Lee said.
As Taiwan’s logic chipmakers are well-positioned in the market, US duties on semiconductors are not expected to exert a significant influence on local firms as they are capable of passing on tariff costs to customers, he said.
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