United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s fourth-largest foundry service provider, yesterday said revenue this year would continue to outgrow its addressable market’s growth of a low-single-digit percentage annually, mainly driven by broader adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
UMC’s addressable market growth lags behind the overall foundry industry’s 22 or 23 percent expansion and the global semiconductor industry’s 15 percent increase this year, it said.
UMC’s revenue last year rose 2.3 percent year-on-year to NT$237.55 billion (US$7.58 billion).
Photo: CNA
“For 2026, we expect the AI-related segment to remain as the primary growth driver for the semiconductor industry,” UMC copresident Jason Wang (王石) told an earnings conference yesterday. “Furthermore, with the continuous commercial deployment of edge AI applications, demand for chip use for general servers is also expected to rise.”
UMC expects the pricing environment to be more “favorable” this year given limited growth in capacity supply, Wang said.
The chipmaker saw this as a “structural” issue, as explosive AI demand is “crowding out” supply of less advanced chips, but building any new mature-node facilities is not justifiable, he said.
UMC plans to expand capacity at its Singaporean fab from the second half of this year, he added.
In addition to AI demand, UMC sees advanced chip packaging and silicon photonics as two new growth engines in the foreseeable future, Wang said.
The chipmaker is engaging with 10 customers to supply the advanced chip packaging solutions with more than 20 chips to tape out this year, he said.
Tape out refers to the final step in the chip design process, in which the complete and verified design data are sent to foundry service providers for manufacturing.
Revenue from UMC’s advanced packaging technology is expected to become significant next year, attributable to wider adoption of such packaging technology to less advanced chips, Wang said.
Regarding silicon photonics, UMC is developing solutions such as photonic integrated circuits and copackaged optics solutions, Wang said.
UMC aims to deliver its “process design kit” next year for customers to prepare for production, through its collaboration with Belgium’s Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre, he said.
This quarter, UMC’s wafer shipments would be flat from last quarter, with a stable factory utilization rate of about 75 percent, while wafer prices would remain firm, the company said.
Gross margin is expected to dip to about 25 percent from 30.7 percent last quarter due to increases in equipment depreciation costs, the company said.
UMC expects depreciation costs to climb about 13 percent year-on-year this year.
“UMC is confident that 2026 will be another growth year as tape-outs on our 22-nanometer platforms accelerate and other new solutions continue to gain business traction,” Wang said.
The company yesterday said net profit last quarter plummeted 32.9 percent to NT$10.06 billion, compared with NT$14.98 billion in the previous quarter.
On an annual basis, net profit expanded 18.3 percent from NT$8.5 billion.
Earnings per share (EPS) dipped to NT$0.81 from NT$1.2 in the previous quarter. That was an increase from NT$0.68 a year earlier.
Last year as a whole, net profit contracted 11.8 percent to NT$41.72 billion, from NT$47.21 billion in 2024. EPS dropped to NT$3.34 from NT$3.8.
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