Foreign media believe that today's TSMC has been in an absolute leading position in advanced technology and process, and under the leadership of its leading edge, it has continuously improved its pricing, and its net profit margin is as high as 40%, which has been suspected of abusing its monopoly market position.
TSMC has basically laid a global leading position after the mass production of 7nmEUV process, when Intel was still trying to promote the mass production of the 10nm process, and now Intel is still drawing cakes for 7nm, TSMC has promoted the mass production of 3nm in the second half of this year and will use this process to produce A16 processors for Apple.
Due to the advantages in advanced process manufacturing, the world's leading chip companies such as Apple, AMD, NVIDIA, etc. will hand over chips to TSMC for production, and even Qualcomm, which has already transferred Samsung, has also recently transferred the Snapdragon 8G1 from Samsung to TSMC FOUNDRY, hoping that TSMC can ship as soon as possible.
Because the chip manufacturing process has enough leading edges, customers also highly recognize TSMC, so TSMC has enough independent pricing power, 2020 Q4 automotive chip companies take the initiative to propose to increase the chip foundry price, TSMC has raised prices since last year, even so AMD, NVIDIA and other chip companies are still worried about the production capacity of advanced processes and take the initiative to pay for part of the order, requiring only TSMC to ensure their production capacity.
However, this has also led to western chip companies accounting for more than 80% of TSMC's revenue, of which the revenue contributed by American chip companies has reached nearly 70%, and a considerable proportion of them come from the West in terms of technology and chip manufacturing materials, resulting in TSMC's dependence on Western chip companies has reached an unprecedented height.
In fact, before 2020, Chinese mainland chip companies contributed a very high proportion of revenue to TSMC, of which Huawei alone contributed 14% of TSMC's revenue, Huawei is also the second largest customer after Apple, and mainland chip companies have contributed 22% of TSMC's revenue.
However, after September 15, 2020, TSMC can no longer produce chips for Huawei, and other chip companies that Chinese mainland have withdrawn their orders because of their concerns, resulting in the rapid reduction of the proportion of revenue contributed by Chinese mainland chip companies to TSMC to about 6%, and the sudden decline in revenue contributed by Chinese mainland chip companies has led to a significant increase in the proportion of revenue contributed by the West.
Because the proportion of revenue contributed by American chip companies is too high, resulting in the United States requiring TSMC to build a factory in the United States and hand over confidential data, and finally TSMC has to comply, it can be seen that it is too dependent on the West is not a good thing for it, forcing it to act in accordance with the requirements of the other party, and now TSMC founder Zhang Zhongmou said that it is difficult to make money on the matter of building a factory in the United States, indicating that it is not a good thing to build a factory in the United States.
Now that foreign media believe that TSMC's process is too advanced, it is suspected of monopoly, which is obviously quite unfavorable to its long-term development, which further proves the importance of the revenue contributed by Chinese mainland chip companies to it before.
In fact, TSMC has also worked hard, in the past was asked not to produce chips for Huawei OEM, TSMC said that more advanced than 7nm technology from the United States has been less than 10%, so it continues to use the 5nm process for Huawei OEM production chips, but then finally completely unable to produce chips for Huawei OEM, and now it is questioned, which makes TSMC worried, indicating the risks that may exist by relying too much on the West.