In the field of global semiconductor foundry, TSMC was not in a leading position at the beginning, and at the beginning TSMC actually lagged behind Samsung, Intel, and even apple, the largest customer at present, was also a customer of Samsung in the early years.
However, TSMC insisted on seeking breakthroughs in process technology, and took the lead in mastering the advanced wafer process, successfully attracting the attention of Apple, and the A11 chip developed by Apple in 2017 was also handed over to TSMC.
In the years that followed, TSMC remained the exclusive foundry of Apple chips, as TSMC was indeed significantly better than Samsung in terms of advanced technology and yield rate.
After becoming Apple's exclusive chip foundry, TSMC's revenue in recent years has naturally continued to increase, after TSMC released data showing that Apple contributed about 90 billion yuan in revenue in 2021, an increase of 20.4% year-on-year.
It should be known that TSMC's revenue for the whole year of 2021 is about 353.5 billion yuan, and Apple has contributed more than a quarter of the revenue.
It is worth mentioning that Apple's contribution will continue to increase in 2022, according to the latest foreign media reports, Apple is expected to contribute more than NT$500 billion to TSMC this year, about 111.8 billion yuan, compared with 2021 will be about 20%.
This means that TSMC will become a company that is highly dependent on Apple, and the impact of Apple on TSMC's revenue will become more and more large in the future.
The reason why foreign media say this is because Apple does have a great influence on TSMC. Because before that, TSMC did not have such a passive situation, before the United States did not modify the chip rules, TSMC had two major super customers, Apple and Huawei.
When TSMC was working on chips for Huawei HiSilicon, Huawei's revenue contribution to TSMC was second only to Apple, but after TSMC could not ship freely, there was only Apple, a super customer.
Based on this situation, foreign media said that TSMC's risk is also increasing, but TSMC did not sit and wait for the risk to come, in the past period of time, TSMC made a series of adjustments, the purpose of which is to reduce Apple's impact on the company.
On the one hand, TSMC is trying to obtain more customer orders, such as establishing cooperation with Intel, and then delegating 5nm chips to MediaTek's mid-range chips, while TSMC has also recaptured Qualcomm's orders from Samsung.
Before restricting shipments, TSMC's factories were mainly in Taiwan and the mainland, but after the revision of the rules, TSMC had plans to build factories around the world, including the United States, Japan, Germany and other countries.
On the other hand, TSMC has announced the establishment of factories around the world, TSMC chose to build factories in other countries, mainly to make orders more diversified, through the global factory to obtain regional orders in the local area, but also to reduce some unnecessary expenses to obtain higher profits.
It can be seen that TSMC is working in the direction of diversified orders to reduce its dependence on Apple as much as possible, and TSMC found that there is a risk, starting from the loss of Huawei orders.
It is precisely because of these adjustments that the outside world thinks that TSMC is beginning to worry, if TSMC is not worried, there is no need to invest in factories around the world, because scale and centralization are more conducive to the development of the semiconductor industry.
So do you think there is a risk in TSMC, which relies on Apple's revenue of hundreds of billions of yuan? Comment, like, share, and share your opinion.