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The Taiwanese chipmaker entered the trillion-dollar club last week, thanks to soaring shares as a result of skyrocketing demand for AI chips.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has seen its net profit grow by 36.3pc in its latest quarterly earnings over the same period last year, beating analyst estimates.
In its earnings report published today (18 July), TSMC said that its revenue stood at NT$673.51bn in its second quarter of 2024 ended 30 June. This represents a more than 40pc rise in quarterly revenue over the same period last year. Revenue also increased 13.6pc over the previous quarter.
Total revenue for the first quarter of the year between January and March stood at more than NT$592bn, an increase of 16.5pc compared to the same period in 2023.
This comes after the Taiwanese chipmaker entered the trillion-dollar club last week, thanks to soaring shares as a result of skyrocketing demand for AI chips.
“Our business in the second quarter was supported by strong demand for our industry-leading 3nm and 5nm technologies, partially offset by continued smartphone seasonality,” said Wendell Huang, senior vice-president and chief financial officer at TSMC.
“Moving into third quarter 2024, we expect our business to be supported by strong smartphone and AI-related demand for our leading-edge process technologies.”
TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker that provides services to the likes of Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm and Apple, now expects revenue to be anywhere between $22.4bn and $23.2bn in its third quarter.
The global surge in AI demand has also benefitted the Taiwanese company, as it has taken a major chunk of the $4.8bn foreign investment in Taiwan’s stock market so far this year, according to Reuters.
Other chipmakers have had similar surges. Nvidia, for instance, has had recent success in producing graphics processing units (GPUs) that power AI models, seeing its revenue skyrocket and making it the world’s third most valuable tech company by market cap.
In early April, the US said it is awarding TSMC billions of dollars in subsidies and loans to boost semiconductor production in the country as part of a broader goal of improving its share in the chips market.
While TSMC has performed better than expected in its earnings, the chipmaker has seen its stock price take a hit following a Bloomberg report that the US is considering tighter restrictions for exports of advanced semiconductor technology to China.
Following the report, the stock prices of various chipmakers and related companies were impacted including ASML, Nvidia, Tokyo Electron, Arm, AMD and Qualcomm.
The stock prices were impacted further from a recent interview with former US president Donald Trump, who told Bloomberg that Taiwan should pay the US for protection from China – raising concerns about US support for Taiwan should Trump win the upcoming presidential election.
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