Sales this year would fall to a range between US$13.2 billion and US$13.7 billion, Franco-Italian semiconductor company STMicroelectronics NV said in a statement yesterday. That is down from a previous range of US$14 billion to US$15 billion.
Chipmakers’ results in the quarter have been mixed. SK Hynix Inc reported its best quarterly profits in six years yesterday thanks to explosive global demand for artificial intelligence (AI). Texas Instruments Inc on Tuesday said that Chinese electronics makers were ramping up orders again after working through stockpiles of unused components, while Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV on Monday reported a drop in revenue because of lower automotive chip orders and gave a disappointing forecast.
“During the quarter, contrary to our prior expectations, customer orders for industrial did not improve and automotive demand declined,” STMicro chief executive officer Jean-Marc Chery said in the statement.
Photo: REUTERS
Automotive revenues were lower than expected and offset higher sales in the company’s personal electronics business, he said.
STMicro — whose chips are used by electric vehicle and smartphone makers, including Tesla Inc and Apple Inc — said overall sales fell 25 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier to US$3.23 billion. That compares to analysts’ average US$3.2 billion forecast, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
“Despite the small beat in the reported quarter, the company did not see the expected recovery in industrial orders and automotive orders declined,” JPMorgan Chase & Co analyst Sandeep Deshpande said. “The key question is, given the company’s very significant sequential cuts, will the market believe that the worst is over?”
Unlike automotive chipmakers who are facing low demand due to disappointing growth in the electric vehicle market, memorychip makers have been benefiting from a race to supply components essential to creating ChatGPT-like generative AI services.
SK Hynix posted an operating profit of 5.47 trillion won (US$3.96 billion) in April to June, its third consecutive quarterly profit after losses last year. Net profit jumped 115 percent year-on-year to 4.12 trillion won and revenues surged 125 percent to 16.42 trillion won — a record quarterly high.
The world’s second-largest memorychip maker dominates the market for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) semiconductors and is a key supplier for Nvidia Corp, which controls about 80 percent of the global AI chip market.
“The continuous rise in overall prices of DRAM and NAND products with strong demand for AI memories including HBM led to 32 percent increase in revenues compared to the previous quarter,” SK Hynix said.
Revenues for HBM chips rose more than 80 percent from the previous quarter and 250 percent year-on-year, it said.
“The company will further solidify the position as a leader in AI memory products by focusing on developing the best process technology and high-performance products based on a stable financial structure,” SK Hynix chief financial officer Kim Woo-hyun said.
Additional reporting by AFP
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