At least one segment of the chip industry is hanging on

Sep 28, 2012 14:31 GMT  ·  By

After learning of Micron's unfortunate showing during its most recent quarter, it is encouraging to learn that a different chip maker did well during the third quarter of 2012, even if the type of chips isn't the same.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC for short, is the world's largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry.

NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, Qualcomm and many others are numbered among its clients. TSMC makes GPUs, SoCs, CPUs and other logic chips for them.

After a strong showing during the second quarter of 2012 (April-June), TSMC is expected to report a 10% increase during the third (July-September).

September has to end before that can happen of course, and the foundry will need to tally many sales, shipment and payment reports. It is probable that the official results won't make it out before mid-October.

This is a ray of sunshine in the night, as overall sales for 2012 are expected to decline, the same way the fourth quarter is expected to return a 10% drop, effectively nullifying the gains in Q3.

This report is somewhat at odds with previous forecasts that revenues will fall in August and September. Thus, TSMC may get lucky and make a profit in the fourth quarter as well. It is, after all, the holiday season, and while it does not have any direct stake in the markets that benefit from the winter celebrations, it makes chips used in the products of almost all companies that do.

Presumably, Microsoft's Windows 8 will determine how high the tendency to buy a new computer or tablet becomes. Based on that, product sales will rise or fall and, with them, so will demand for TSMC's services.

All we can say is that with all the fuss about the bugs that Windows 8 supposedly does or does not have, things can go in either direction.