AMD Q3 performance fell short of expectations, and analysts said the decline in PC shipments would affect TSMC revenue.
CTOnews.com, Oct. 7, AMD announced yesterday that its revenue in the third quarter of 2022 will be lower than expected in the previous quarter. As a result, Lu Xingzhi, a semiconductor analyst in Taiwan, pointed out that the announcement would make it more difficult to predict TSMC's revenue.
TSMC is currently the world's largest contract manufacturer of chips, and its partnership with AMD has proved to be the key to the latter's regular delivery of technologically advanced products to the market. Many of TSMC's HPC customers are sceptical about market demand in the coming months, analysts said.
AMD's preliminary results for the third quarter focused on a slowdown in the growth of its consumer products. Before the report, the company had expected revenue of $6.7 billion, but revenue was $1.1 billion lower than expected and now stands at $5.6 billion, mainly due to a drop in CPU sales of desktops and laptops.
CTOnews.com has reported that TSMC's September revenue was NT $208 million, up about 36 per cent from a year earlier, but down 5 per cent from a month earlier. The growth is mainly due to the strength of the dollar, which benefits non-US exporters such as TSMC.
Lu Xingzhi believes that as the semiconductor industry grapples with supply chain problems and an economic slowdown, TSMC's orders and revenue next year will become unpredictable, and the main participants in TSMC's customers are not aware of the demand for its products this quarter.
It also injected new uncertainty into AMD's fate, as preliminary earnings results showed that despite the decline in personal computing revenue, its data centre business remained a bastion and gave a strong annual growth rate of 45 per cent. However, month-on-month growth was 8%, suggesting that the data center sector may also be slowing, as high inflation limits the company's ability to upgrade hardware. The data center division has proved itself to be one of the company's strongest businesses this year.
Analysts believe that the uncertainty of high-performance computing has also raised questions about TSMC's revenue in 2023, which is also a concern for several investment banks. Goldman Sachs, for example, believes that capacity utilisation of TSMC's 7nm and 6nm process technologies is declining and that a potential drop in orders will lead to flat revenue growth at the end of the quarter.
Even with fewer orders, rising costs have forced TSMC to raise prices, and these effects will be reflected in revenue growth again next year as new orders are completed. Rising prices have also slowed the company's adoption of new technologies and extended the time it takes for the company to recoup capital expenditure.
"TSMC's consolidated revenue in September was NT $208.25 billion, down 4.5% from the previous month."
