Source: Content from "
China Business Times
", thank you.
In TSMC's latest earnings conference, it not only released financial forecasts that the fourth quarter of 2020's consolidated revenue would increase by 2.14% to 4.61% quarter-on-quarter, but also that the overall scale would set a new record. In addition, TSMC's consolidated revenue for the whole year of 2020, if calculated in US dollars, is expected to grow by 30%, and even its capital expenditure for the whole year will reach US$17 billion, reaching a record high, surpassing the global foundry industry's average of 20%. TSMC's 5-nanometer layout has even expanded further. In addition to attracting orders from Intel CPUs, Nvidia's Ampere architecture's latest 30 series GPU orders are also expected to return in 2021. Obviously, with the advanced process technology dominating the competition and the tight supply and demand of mature processes, foundry will be the industry with the highest visibility in Taiwan's manufacturing industry in the short term, and TSMC will still be an important support for Taiwan's economic growth in 2020-2021. At the same time, TSMC's perfect advanced deployment has enabled Taiwan's semiconductor clustering effect to re-emerge in 2021, and its position as a global advanced process production center has been further established.
Benefiting from the fact that orders from Taiwanese companies such as Huawei HiSilicon were shipped before September 14, and TSMC's orders for advanced processes such as 7nm and 5nm were fully loaded, other major customers such as Apple, AMD, Xilinx, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Nvidia, etc. were competing for high-end production capacity, which still had a positive effect on TSMC's performance, especially Apple's first 5G mobile phone, the iPhone 12 series, equipped with Qualcomm X55 modem mass-produced at TSMC's 7nm, and Apple's A14 application processor began to use 5nm mass production for shipment. Therefore, 5G and high-performance computing still supported TSMC's consolidated revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020 to be higher than the third quarter.
In fact, the fourth quarter performance of Taiwan's second-tier wafer foundries in 2020 is also worth looking forward to, including UMC, World Advanced, Powerchip, etc., mainly because the 8-inch wafer foundry capacity is in short supply due to the endless orders for large driver ICs, power management ICs, RF ICs, etc., and the launch of 5G mobile phones, the improvement of the automotive electronics market, and the transfer of orders brought about by the US sanctions on SMIC, and even some of UMC's 8-inch wafer foundry prices will be significantly increased, especially UMC's 8-inch wafers account for 30~40% of the combined revenue, which is a high benefit, as well as UMC's 28nm OLED panel driver IC and image signal processor orders are strong.
As emerging applications such as 5G, AI, automotive electronics, and the Internet of Things will grow rapidly, and advanced processes continue to advance and lead other competitors, including TSMC's 5nm enhanced version will be mass-produced in 2021, and 4nm and 3nm will be trial-produced. Moreover, the world's major mobile phone application processors all rely on TSMC's foundry services. Even if the consumer market is reshuffled, it will have no impact on TSMC's performance. This reflects the strong demand of customers for advanced processes. TSMC is also a global supplier with stable yield and large volume. Therefore, the production capacity vacated by Huawei was immediately filled by other customers. Even in 2021, TSMC's orders from Huawei will all be zero. Huawei's mobile phone sales order gap can still be filled by Apple, OPPO, VIVO, Apple and other companies. Its related ICs have the opportunity to place orders with TSMC again. Moreover, Huawei's communication equipment order gap will be filled by Nokia and Ericsson. In addition, with the strong demand for high-performance computing, automotive and AI chip orders, AMD, NXP, Nvidia and others will also be able to take advantage of the opportunity to invest in large quantities.
In general, in addition to Apple, which will account for more than half of TSMC's 5nm production capacity, other potential customers will include Nvidia, AMD, Xilinx, MediaTek, Broadcom, Bitmain, etc., and even Qualcomm will return to TSMC with large orders at the end of 2021, especially 5G mobile phone chips such as Snapdragon 885 and baseband chips; in addition, mature processes continue to be fully loaded in response to related Internet of Things, driver ICs, power management ICs, MCUs, etc., especially the supply and demand of 8-inch wafer foundries remain tight, and the increase in 2021 is expected to be 10% higher than that in 2020, which is beneficial to Taiwan's second-tier CMOS wafer foundries. In the short term, the semiconductor industry in mainland China is facing difficulties. Taiwan's wafer foundry industry will continue to enjoy the policy dividends of de-Americanization on the other side of the strait. Therefore, it is expected that the prosperity of Taiwan's industry will continue to show a steady growth in 2021.
*Disclaimer: This article is originally written by the author. The content of the article is the author's personal opinion. Semiconductor Industry Observer reprints it only to convey a different point of view. It does not mean that Semiconductor Industry Observer agrees or supports this point of view. If you have any objections, please contact Semiconductor Industry Observer.
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