
A tale of three chippies
TSMC, the world’s largest foundry, had a “good” pandemic but second half guidance shows it will enjoy the rebound and it continues to expect to see its full year’s sales grow 20 percent in 2020. IC Insights thinks TSMC will do better than that with a 2H20/1H20 increase of 8 percent yielding a full-year jump of 24 percent. TSMC has already shipped one billion 7nm ICs and expects 5nm shipments in 2H20 to be worth 8 percent of 2020 revenue.
TSMC strong and getting stronger. Source: IC Insights.
Intel, the previous king of the semiconductor hill, has been troubled for the past five years or so and has been overtaken in chip manufacturing. Nonetheless Intel enjoyed a relatively buoyant 1H20 as large IT beasts sought to add to data centers with x86 architecture computers.
Intel’s first-half strength expected to evaporate. Source: IC Insights.
However, Intel’s 2H20/1H20 expectations are for a 10 percent drop in revenue (Figure 2). The company attributed its strong 1H20 sales and soft 2H20 expectations to some customers building inventory, a “safety stock” of parts given the uncertainties surrounding the trade issues. This inventory is expected to burn off in the second half of this year.
The third of the triumvirate is STMicroelectronics. Like many European chip companies ST is broadly exposed to automotive and industrial electronics. The pandemic’s immediate impact was to shut down many operations in these sectors driving down demand.
ST expected to rebound from weak first half. Source: IC Insights.
ST, the world’s fourth-largest analog IC supplier, suffered a drop of 19 percent in sales revenue 1H20/2H19. But with the re-opening of multiple sectors of work ST is now expecting a 19 percent boost in 2H20/1H20 sales (Figure 3). However, even after a strong 2H20, ST’s total semiconductor sales are expected to be down 1 percent year on year.
Related links and articles:
News articles:
How the pandemic will affect 33 chip product categories in 2020
Nvidia booms while Xilinx, Dialog falter in fabless ranking
Intel goes foundry for 7nm due to yield issues
