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(Bloomberg) – Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. expects sales to increase by more than 20% in 2021, saying its crucial role in helping alleviate a global chip shortage affecting automotive manufacturing and other industries .
TSMC, chipmaker of Apple Inc. and a key partner of many of the world’s largest automakers, expects semiconductor supply to remain limited until 2022, CC chief executive said on Thursday. Wei. The company will increase microcontroller production by nearly 60% this year, which will help significantly reduce the chip shortage for its automotive customers starting this quarter, executives said.
Revenue for the current quarter could reach between $ 14.6 billion and $ 14.9 billion, in line with analysts’ average of $ 14.7 billion. TSMC’s sales outlook for 2021 marks a slight increase from previous forecast of 20% full-year sales growth.
“TSMC has actively taken action throughout the first half of this year and will continue to do so throughout the year to address the challenges of chip sourcing” for automakers, Wei told analysts. “We have worked aggressively with other customers to reallocate our pad capacity to support the global automotive industry. “
As an ongoing semiconductor shortage has hampered the global economic recovery from Covid-19, vendors like TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip maker, are among the beneficiaries as they rush to honor the orders. The Taiwanese company is also expected to benefit from plans by Apple Inc., its biggest customer, to prepare 90 million units of upgraded iPhones for the second half of this year. Capacity will remain limited until the end of the year and will run until 2022, Wei said.
Click here for a live blog on TSMC’s earnings call.
Net profit for the quarter ended in June rose 11%, although profits were slightly lower than analysts’ estimates.
In early July, Daimler AG and Jaguar Land Rover warned that sales would be further squeezed by the persistent shortage of chips, with the latter saying second-quarter deliveries would be 50% worse than initially expected. Growth in the UK economy slowed to 0.8% in May, in part due to a 16.4% drop in production of transport equipment caused by a shortage of semiconductors.
Automotive customer revenue increased 12% from the first quarter, while high performance computing grew by a similar magnitude. Sales to smartphone customers, the bulk of its revenue, fell 3% in the second quarter, slower depending on the season.
“As TSMC will likely continue to load its capacity to extremely high utilization over the next few quarters, we expect the strong revenue momentum to continue through the end of 2021,” Citigroup analyst Roland Shu wrote in a commentary. note last week. “Strong demand but limited capacity increases in the supply chain will continue to allow TSMC to make the best use of its capacity and further strengthen its pricing power.”
The gross margin for the second quarter was 50%, below the average of about 51% expected by analysts, in part because of the gains of the Taiwan dollar during the period. For the September quarter, TSMC forecasts a gross margin of 49.5% to 51.5%. Analysts had seen 51.5%, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, in early June, a cluster of Covid-19 infections at a factory in central Taiwan forced King Yuan Electronics Co., one of the world’s leading chip testing service providers, to temporarily shut down its operations. operations. This has led to minor disruptions in the Taiwanese semiconductor supply chain on which many countries around the world depend. TSMC said Monday that three of its employees had been confirmed to be infected, although it saw no impact on operations.
(Updates with forecasts for the whole year, 3T starting with the first paragraph)
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