Sales from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) largest customer grew to account for 26 percent of the chipmaker’s total revenue last year.
Although TSMC financial data did not specify the customer, analysts said they suspect it was Apple Inc.
TSMC’s largest customer contributed NT$405.4 billion (US$14.27 billion) to the chipmaker’s sales, up NT$68.63 billion or 20.37 percent from 2020.
Photo: I-Hwa Cheng, Bloomberg
That brought the largest customer’s share of TSMC’s sales to 26 percent, up from 25 percent a year earlier.
The data reinforced analysts’ suspicions that the customer is Apple, as revenue from its TSMC orders grew more than 20 percent from a year earlier.
TSMC’s consolidated revenue reached a record NT$1.587 trillion last year, up 18.53 percent from 2020, on the back of emerging technologies such as 5G and Internet of Things applications, high-performance computing devices and automotive electronics.
TSMC is believed to be the sole supplier of A-series processors for Apple’s iPhone line because of the chipmaker’s advanced 5-nanometer process, which is the latest technology the Taiwanese company has used for commercial production, analysts said.
Apple’s Mac and iPad lines have also used TSMC’s chips, analysts said.
Apple last week unveiled the M1 Ultra chip, which the company says is the next leap forward for its silicon program and the Mac.
Analysts said that TSMC is expected to benefit from the debut of the M1 Ultra chip this year.
Last year, TSMC’s second-largest customer contributed NT$153.74 billion to its sales, accounting for 10 percent of the chipmaker’s total, company data showed.
Analysts said they suspect the customer was Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD).
TSMC’s data indicated it was the first time sales from its second-largest customer rose to 10 percent of its total sales.
The US market was the largest buyer of TSMC’s chips last year, generating NT$1.01 trillion in sales, up 24 percent from a year earlier, and making up 64 percent of the chipmaker’s total.
That was followed by Taiwan, where the company generated NT$203.96 billion in sales, a 58 percent increase from a year earlier and accounting for 12.8 percent of TSMC’s total sales.
China was third, generating NT$164.55 billion in sales, down 29.6 percent from a year earlier and representing 10.3 percent of the chipmaker’s total sales, TSMC’s data showed.
Analysts said the decline in sales to China largely reflected Washington’s sanctions against Huawei Technologies Co (華為), which led to TSMC halting shipments to the Chinese firm.
TSMC said its 7-nanometer process created NT$440.38 billion in sales last year, up 11.5 percent from a year earlier, while the 5-nanometer process registered NT$262.33 billion in sales, up 188 percent from a year earlier. The technologies were the major sources of sales for TSMC.
TSMC is developing the more sophisticated 3 and 2-nanometer processes, and it is set to start mass production using 3-nanometer technology in the second half of the year.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS