According to 2018 Q4 financial report released by TSMC, its quarter’s revenue is up to NTD 289.77 billion(about $9.4 billion) with a 4.4% YoY growth and a 11.3% QoQ growth of which 7nm process contributes 23% revenue to be a peak motivation.
Nanya benefits from memory price rising of first three quarters all year round of 2018. Annual consolidated revenue is up to $2.75 billion with a 54.3% YoY growth. Although 55% gross margin is not as high as 60-70% of companies like Samsung and SK Hynix, it has a surge compared with 44.8% gross margin of 2017.
7nm chip order of AMD just relys on 7nm process of TSMC as GF quitting development and production of 7nm process. TSMC, SPIL and TMFE are three OSAT suppliers of AMD 7nm chips. Division of three companies is packaging and testing EPYC series by TSMC, producing 7nm CPU by SPIL and producing GPU by TMFE.
According to Samsung executives, they plan to produce 7nm EUV process in the second half of this year, and more advanced 3nm GAA process in 2021. Although TSMC previously released mass production of 7nm EUV process, Samsung still has chance to catch up with TSMC due to retical inspection tool developed by itself.
Tsinghua Unigroup officially annouces its subsidiary has made packaging and testing for mass production of high-capacity enterprise 3D NAND flash memory chip.
Samsung has a $75.9 billion revenue of last year with a 15.9% share, which is on world’s top; SK Hynix ranking third place has a 38.2% revenue compared with last year, which is fastest among top ten companies.
Samsung’s Q4 operating margin is about $9.6 billion with a 28.7% YoY decline and a 38.5% QoQ drop, according to its offical 2018 Q4 financial report guidance. It also has a 18.2% lower expectation than Wall Street analysts, which is because of memory prices reduction and decline in mobile phone bussiness of Samsung.
DRAM prices begin to fall since 2018 Q4. Nanya Technology, has a $157 million consolidated revenue of last December, with a 10.6% decline compared with last quarter and a 18.9% reduction compared with last year, which set a record low of last 15 months.
Memory prices will keep falling due to the weakness of PC, server and smart phone in 2019, but Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron cut their capacity to prevent prices reduction, as it is unexpected.
According to Western Digital, SSD adaptation rate will rise to 90% in fiscal 2023 from 53% in fiscal 2018. In addition, average SSD capacity on desktop computer and laptop will be around 700GB.
