Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) shares yesterday rose 2.27 percent to the highest since Aug. 12 on media speculation that the world’s biggest chipmaker planned to hike wafer prices by up to 20 percent due to a quarters-long chip crunch and rising manufacturing costs.
The Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported that TSMC had told chip designing customers about raising prices from next quarter by 10 to 20 percent, as the chipmaker aims to maintain its gross margin, which stood at 50 percent last quarter.
The Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday said that TSMC had upped wafer prices by 20 percent for most of its technologies, including 7-nanometer, 12-nanometer, 28-nanometer and 40-nanometer technologies.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
The new prices took effect immediately after customers received the notifications at noon yesterday, the report said.
TSMC and MediaTek Inc (聯發科), one of TSMC’s top clients, could not be reached for comment as of press time last night.
TSMC has been reluctant to raise prices even though its peers, such as United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), increased prices on new orders by 10 percent or more early this year amid drastic increases in manufacturing costs.
Responding to investors’ concerns over its pricing strategy, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) last month said that the “company’s pricing strategy is strategic, and we don’t take an opportunistic approach.”
“We work with our customers closely and we want to help them to be successful while we get a proper return,” Wei said. “So that’s why we are firming up our wafer pricing, and we are confident that we can keep our gross margin at 50 percent or above in the long term.”
A short-term imbalance in the supply chain, driven by a need to ensure supply security, and the structural increases entailed by long-term demand are expected to persist, the Hsinchu-based company said earlier.
TSMC’s capacity would remain tight through next year, fueled by increasing demand for its advanced technologies and specialty technologies used in 5G devices and applications of high-performance computing, it said.
The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally accelerated a digital transformation, making semiconductors more pervasive and essential in people’s lives, it added.
TSMC shares have rallied 9.14 percent this year, closing at NT$585 yesterday in Taipei trading.
BUILDUP: US General Dan Caine said Chinese military maneuvers are not routine exercises, but instead are ‘rehearsals for a forced unification’ with Taiwan China poses an increasingly aggressive threat to the US and deterring Beijing is the Pentagon’s top regional priority amid its rapid military buildup and invasion drills near Taiwan, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday. “Our pacing threat is communist China,” Hegseth told the US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense during an oversight hearing with US General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Beijing is preparing for war in the Indo-Pacific as part of its broader strategy to dominate that region and then the world,” Hegseth said, adding that if it succeeds, it could derail
CHIP WAR: The new restrictions are expected to cut off China’s access to Taiwan’s technologies, materials and equipment essential to building AI semiconductors Taiwan has blacklisted Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯), dealing another major blow to the two companies spearheading China’s efforts to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chip technologies. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’ International Trade Administration has included Huawei, SMIC and several of their subsidiaries in an update of its so-called strategic high-tech commodities entity list, the latest version on its Web site showed on Saturday. It did not publicly announce the change. Other entities on the list include organizations such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as companies in China, Iran and elsewhere. Local companies need
CRITICISM: It is generally accepted that the Straits Forum is a CCP ‘united front’ platform, and anyone attending should maintain Taiwan’s dignity, the council said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it deeply regrets that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) echoed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China” principle and “united front” tactics by telling the Straits Forum that Taiwanese yearn for both sides of the Taiwan Strait to move toward “peace” and “integration.” The 17th annual Straits Forum yesterday opened in Xiamen, China, and while the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) local government heads were absent for the first time in 17 years, Ma attended the forum as “former KMT chairperson” and met with Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Huning (王滬寧). Wang
CROSS-STRAIT: The MAC said it barred the Chinese officials from attending an event, because they failed to provide guarantees that Taiwan would be treated with respect The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Friday night defended its decision to bar Chinese officials and tourism representatives from attending a tourism event in Taipei next month, citing the unsafe conditions for Taiwanese in China. The Taipei International Summer Travel Expo, organized by the Taiwan Tourism Exchange Association, is to run from July 18 to 21. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokeswoman Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮) on Friday said that representatives from China’s travel industry were excluded from the expo. The Democratic Progressive Party government is obstructing cross-strait tourism exchange in a vain attempt to ignore the mainstream support for peaceful development
RSS