In the fourth quarter of 2022, the chip order manufacturer TSMC had sales of almost 626 billion Taiwan dollars or a good 19.9 billion US dollars and thus achieved annual sales of 75.9 billion US dollars – growth of 34 percent.
The growth in profit was even stronger, within a year of 21.4 billion rose to $34.1 billion (+59.5 percent). This was accompanied by higher gross and operating margins of 62.2 and 52 percent respectively in the fourth quarter. TSMC attributes this to positive currency effects in exchange rate conversions and cost optimization in operations.
The recession is knocking
However, the reduced demand for semiconductor components is also evident at TSMC. Sales in the fourth quarter, calculated in US dollars, fell slightly by 1.5 percent compared with the third quarter. In addition, the company states that the currency effects and cost optimizations have compensated for a lower utilization of the semiconductor plants.
In the current first quarter of 2023, TSMC also expects a sharp drop in sales to USD 16.7-17.5 billion, accompanied by significantly lower gross and operating margins.
However, research and development spending has continued to increase recently, to $1.4 billion in the fourth quarter and $5.5 billion for the whole of 2022 (+23 percent).
5 nm at the turnover peak
TSMC made the most money in the fourth quarter of 2022 with 5-nanometer wafers, which accounted for 32 percent of sales. At the same time, the proportion of 7 nm wafers fell to 22 percent – all older production generations remain stable, since many companies do not need the most modern processes.
The latest manufacturing technology brings in the most money. These are now semiconductors with structures of 5 and 4 nm.
AMD, for example, has its graphics chips for the Radeon RX 7000 series and the compute dies for Ryzen 7000 and Epyc 9400 (Genoa) manufactured with 5 nm technology. In addition, under the 5 nm generation, TSMC also summarizes the improved 4 nm process that Nvidia uses for its Ada Lovelace GPUs (GeForce RTX 4000). Apple uses a mix of 5 and 4 nm for its current Systems-on-Chip (SoCs).
So-called high-performance chips (HPC) accounted for the majority of sales again in 2022 with a share of 41 percent. In 2021, these were still smartphone chips such as processors and modems. TSMC understands HPC as all CPUs, GPUs and computing accelerators from the notebook class upwards.
The stock exchange reacted positively to the announcement of the business figures. TSMC’s share rose about 5 percent to around 79 euros.
(mma)
