The increasing importance of chip manufacturing has made TSMC more well-known and rapidly promoted. Just like today's NVIDIA, it has caught up with the rapid popularity of artificial intelligence, so it has become the focus of attention, and its market value has also increased rapidly.
However, TSMC's glory seems to be a thing of the past, and with the implementation of chip restrictions in the United States, TSMC's good days are gone forever and it has begun to enter a period of struggle. Recently, the news came that TSMC has become a little embarrassed!
Have you noticed that TSMC founder Zhang Zhongmou has repeatedly mentioned such remarks as "globalization is dead" in the past two years.
This is because TSMC can no longer develop as before, and can rely on its own efforts and technical level to compete normally with its peers, and can rely on its leading technology to win more customers and continue to grow and develop.
In recent years, the United States has begun to interfere in global semiconductors, constantly revising chip rules and requiring companies using American technology to comply with its export control rules. The chip manufacturing field engaged in by TSMC is inseparable from American technology.
In this case, TSMC had to face a lot of helpless demands, and as a result, the situation began to become awkward.
First of all, TSMC needs to stop giving chips to Chinese foundries that have been added to the entity list in accordance with the requirements of US rules. However, in recent years, thousands of Chinese companies have been added to the entity list by the United States, including many of TSMC's chip foundry customers.
For example, Huawei used to be TSMC's second largest customer, second only to the American company Apple, but TSMC could only stop manufacturing chips for Huawei, and the loss could only be borne by itself, but this is not the most serious, and more embarrassing events appeared!
Recently, Huawei's self-developed Kirin chip has officially returned, and after the Mate 60 series is installed, the performance is not inferior to that of TSMC foundry chips. Does this make TSMC very depressed, if it is not to stop foundry, Huawei may still cooperate with it.
The key is that the return of Kirin means the progress of the mainland chip industry chain, and TSMC will lose more Chinese enterprise customers.
Secondly, TSMC embraced American customers, which led to a decline in capacity utilization and was forced to cut prices to grab orders. After stopping the OEM chips for Huawei, Liu Deyin easily said that the vacant orders would be filled soon, and then the American companies did fill it.
But as a result, the proportion of TSMC's U.S. customers has become larger and larger, and TSMC felt good at first, which did not affect the overall revenue. However, the impact came later, and most of the American customers began to cut chip foundry orders.
On the one hand, because the chip situation has changed from a shortage of cores to a surplus, the inventory of American customers has become larger, and chips cannot be sold. On the other hand, the impact of chip restrictions in the United States is increasing, restricting more chip shipments from American companies, especially high-end process chips.
Qualcomm, Nvidia, MediaTek and others have cut chip orders, resulting in a serious decline in TSMC's capacity utilization.
Especially in the 7nm process, the production capacity profit margin fell to 70% last year, and TSMC once planned to shut down some EUV lithography machines and encourage employees to take vacations. This year, the situation is even worse, and it is said that the 7nm utilization rate has fallen below 60%.
Recently, the news came that TSMC's 7nm production capacity profit margin may be less than 50%. As a result, Taiwan media reported that TSMC will significantly reduce the price of 7nm after providing a 2% discount in the mature process, and the decline will be about 5% to 10%.
The purpose is naturally to reduce prices to grab customers and alleviate the decline in capacity utilization, you must know that 7nm was once the mainstay.
TSMC, as a major manufacturer in the wafer manufacturing industry, now has to rely on price cuts to grab customers, is it even more embarrassing.
And that's not all, there are more embarrassing incidents. TSMC has been chasing advanced processes, and now it has advanced to 3nm, but Apple's mobile phones have not achieved good results after being installed, and the sales volume is even worse than Huawei's mobile phones equipped with less advanced Kirin.
This makes people have to question TSMC's advanced manufacturing process, TSMC spent a lot of money and time to achieve 3nm chips, not only not many customers use them, but Apple only pays half of the finished product cost of 3nm chips.
Moreover, TSMC fell into the embarrassment of building a factory in the United States. Under the lure and pressure of the United States, TSMC had to go to the United States to build a factory, but not only could not get the promised chip subsidies, but also was subject to more restrictions and was required to build another packaging and testing plant.
The cost of building a factory in the United States is very high, it is difficult to make a profit, and the United States has imposed various requirements, TSMC has become in a dilemma, and can only temporarily postpone mass production for one year. In this regard, some foreign media directly commented that Zhang Zhongmou was a little embarrassed!
I'm afraid Zhang Zhongmou didn't expect that TSMC's situation would be so bad!It is no wonder that Zhang Zhongmou has repeatedly complained that globalization is dead.