Powerchip Technology Corp’s (力晶科技) new 12-inch wafer plant in China is set to start mass production by the end of this year as the company prepares for a potential relisting on Taiwan’s stock market, a senior executive said yesterday.
The plant in Hefei, Anhui Province, is operated by Nexchip Semiconductor Corp (合晶集成), a joint venture between Powerchip and the Hefei City Government.
The 12.8 billion yuan plant (US$1.89 billion) will help ease Powerchip’s capacity constraints and play a major role in its capacity allocation plan, Powerchip Group (力晶集團) chairman Frank Huang (黃崇仁) told Unique Satellite TV yesterday.
“Powerchip has an installed capacity of 100,000 a month [in Taiwan], but is still facing a severe capacity problem,” he said.
Hsinchu-based Powerchip, primarily a maker of driver ICs for LCD panels, plans to boost the Hefei plant’s monthly capacity to 10,000 wafers by the second quarter of next year after producing a first batch of chips by the end of this year.
The ultimate goal is to boost the monthly capacity to 40,000 wafers in 2019 and to 80,000 wafers in 2020, the company said.
The Hefei plant would also help Powerchip make room for Nor flash memory production, Huang said.
The company last week said it planned to return to the NOR flash memory sector to take advantage of the strong market demand.
The Hefei plant would be a major manufacturing site for driver ICs, while Taiwanese production lines would be used to make NOR flash chips, Huang said.
He expects severe supply constraints of NOR flash memory chips to extend into the second half and even into next year as global major chipmakers have exited the market.
Powerchip, originally a major Taiwanese DRAM chip suppler, has transformed itself into a foundry service provider focused on making driver ICs, image sensors and power management chips, as well as DRAM chips.
Net profit last year was NT$6.41 billion (US$211.1 million), or NT$2.97 per share, marking a fourth straight profitable year.
Powerchip shares were delisted from the Taipei Stock Exchange in 2012 as the company ran into financial trouble following a slump in the DRAM industry.
Huang said the company is preparing for a comeback and wants to get its share back on the local stock market in the near future.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
RSS