Posted on Tuesday, March 12 2019 @ 10:46 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Market watchers are predicting that
TSMC may see its first annual net income drop in eight years. The Taiwanese foundry is suddenly hit by a number of headwinds, including a slowdown in datacenter chip demand growth, a saturated smartphone market, the cryptocurrency crash, less favorable macroeconomic conditions, and the impact from the faulty batch of chemicals
that impacted first quarter performance.
TSMC already described 2019 as "a slow year" for its operations and also the overall semiconductor market, citing macroeconomic uncertainty, and disappointing high-end smartphone sales that have led to inventory pile-ups in the supply chain. The use of substandard photoresist chemicals that disrupted its 12/16nm chip production at Fab 14B earlier this year is set to have a further impact on the foundry's performance this year.
As such, TSMC will have a harder time hitting profit growth this year. A lot will depend on order intake for new 7nm products for the HPC, 5G, AI, and IoT markets.
