On May 10, TSMC, the world's largest chip foundry, announced its April 2022 revenue report. According to the report, TSMC's consolidated revenue in April 2022 was NT$172.561 billion (about RMB38.999 billion), an increase of 0.3% month-on-month and a 55% increase year-on-year, surpassing NT$172.176 billion (about RMB38.912 billion) in January this year, a record high in a single month.
So far, TSMC expects second-quarter revenue of $17.6 billion (about 112.112 billion yuan) to $18.2 billion (about 115.934 billion yuan), and gross profit margin is expected to be 56%-58%, a new high. In addition, the company maintained a strong growth trend driven by a large number of foundry demand, with full-year revenue growth of 25%-29%.
As the world's largest chip foundry, TSMC sits on most of the semiconductor industry's share, most of the chip manufacturers are competing for TSMC's production capacity, after Apple, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Intel and other dozens of manufacturers in order to compete for advanced technology production lines, have paid tens of billions of advance payments. Apple has always been a "loyal fan" of TSMC's advanced technology, and thanks to the iPhone 13 series of big sales, the two tech giants can't make money.
TSMC's business is becoming more and more prosperous, and the employees at the bottom are also following the profits. In order to attract talent to join and retain talent, the company will implement a "buy stock subsidy" program for tens of thousands of employees, encouraging employees to buy their own stocks in the form of subsidies. In addition, employees will receive a certain range of salary increase benefits.
Now the lack of core is still a problem that various technology and Internet companies will encounter, even if TSMC increases its horsepower, works overtime day and night, completes orders, and even chooses to build factories everywhere, it is still unable to alleviate the global chip shortage. With the gradual increase in demand for vehicle-grade chips, IoT, smart phones and other products, countless orders have been pressed to TSMC's breathlessness, and it is impossible to increase the OEM price.
In the second half of the year, TSMC also has large orders from Apple and other manufacturers, such as the A16 chip required for the iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max, which is produced by the 4nm process. At the same time, small-scale mass production of 3nm is also underway.
Samsung and Intel, which are also the heads of semiconductors, are also painstakingly studying more high-end production processes, such as Samsung plans to use 3nm GAA to achieve "curve overtaking" for TSMC, and Intel also announced that it will achieve large-scale mass production of 18A processes in 2025. To this end, TSMC has also begun to launch a 1.4nm process node to maintain its industry-leading edge.
Xiao Lei believes that in the next few years, the situation of chip shortage may not be alleviated, and TSMC is likely to expand its semiconductor territory and improve the production capacity of advanced processes, and then the revenue will increase significantly.