TSMC’s rather optimistic quarterly report and the accompanying forecasts of the company’s management could not outweigh the negative information background created the day before by the statements of the US presidential candidate Donald Trump about Taiwan. The company’s management emphasized that it does not intend to create a joint venture with local companies in the US.
Image source: Samsung Electronics
In fact, the very possibility of creating such a joint venture is dictated by the specifics of TSMC’s work on building plants in Japan, where it is the majority shareholder of the JASM joint venture, while local Sony and Denso own 20 and 10% of its shares, respectively. In Germany, where TSMC is going to build its chip manufacturing plant, a joint venture has also been created, in which the Taiwanese company itself controls 70% of the shares, and the remaining 30% are distributed equally between Bosch, Infineon and NXP. The latter, although registered in the Netherlands, is capable of representing the interests of the European semiconductor business.
In the U.S., TSMC is building advanced chip factories on behalf of a wholly owned subsidiary. CEO CC Wei said in a Q&A session following the company’s quarterly earnings call yesterday that TSMC has no plans to set up a joint venture in the U.S. to address geopolitical uncertainties. All of TSMC’s expansion projects outside Taiwan are currently on track, he said. “We have not made any changes to our overseas fab expansion plans yet. We will continue to expand in Arizona and Kumamoto, Japan, and perhaps in Europe in the future. There is no change in our strategy. We will continue to operate in accordance with our current practices.”
The stock market ultimately responded to the mixed signals regarding Taiwan’s chip business by sending TSMC shares down 1.79% in morning trading, after they had strengthened slightly in the pre-trading session yesterday. Overall, the Taiwan stock index also fell 0.73% on Friday morning, with geopolitical factors weighing more heavily on investors’ minds than technology and economics.
However, Barclays analysts generally positively assessed the reports of TSMC management about the company’s immediate plans. According to experts, the boom in artificial intelligence systems is useful for it because the average crystal area of the chips produced will grow by 10%, and therefore customers will need more chips to solve their own problems. Accordingly, TSMC’s revenue, which produces these chips from silicon wafers of a fixed area, will grow. In addition, demand for advanced technological processes will grow, and the same 2-nm technology will be able to bring TSMC more revenue than 3-nm technology at a comparable stage of the market cycle.
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Source: 3dnews.ru
