14 DAY TRIAL // Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's premier mass producer of semiconductors, makes a stark contrast with Canon. It makes a sharp contrast with a lot of companies for that matter.
With Sharp, Sony and even Advanced Micro Devices doing so poorly at the moment, the image of the IT industry is looking rather grim right now.
Even Acer's profit and Lenovo's continued progress haven't lifted people's spirits, or those of analysts, although the latter do seem to be distracting themselves with optimistic thoughts of the future.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is a glimmer of light in this twilight, having made 141.38 billion New Taiwan Dollars for the third quarter, ended on September 30, 2012.
That sum is the equivalent of $4.82 billion and 3.71 billion Euro, according to exchange rates. That makes it 32.8% higher than the one made during the third quarter of 2011.
Meanwhile, profit was of NT$49.3 billion ($1.7 billion), or 62.2% over the same quarter of the previous year.
As for the sequential comparisons, they are quite promising as well. All in all, TSMC did very well, even despite the weak economy, particularly the decline in PC sales.
For those who want all the numbers, the quarter-over-quarter increase was of 10.4% in revenue and 17.9% in net income.
The 28nm manufacturing process experienced extensive use. Shipments of GPUs and anything else built on it more than doubled and accounted for 13% of all wafer revenue. 40nm (older-generation GPUs) accounted for 27%, while 65nm covered 22%.
The foundry didn't exactly say what it foresaw for the remaining three months of 2012, but if it managed to flourish during a problematic period, it will probably benefit even more from the holiday season.
Either way, it will move forward with process advancements. It does, after all, need to ready the 16nm node for ARMV's ARMv8 64-bit architecture.