14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the favorable financial results that TSMC finished 2010 with were enough to paint a pretty picture ahead of the world-class foundry, and its forecast for 2011 speaks for itself.
As end-users know, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) is the foundry in charge with making the majority of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, among many other things.
Like so many other companies, it provided its financial results for the year 2010 not long ago, revealing to have scored record revenues.
Now, it seems that the same outfit has fairly high hopes for the ongoing year as well, as it has raised its forecast for chip market growth.
As a certain report has it, the market for tablet PCs will expand significantly, leading to a much better demand for all sorts of semiconductors.
For TSMC, this is significant, as it is currently responsible for the making of 60% of the tablet logic ICs, and this is not including those for the Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy tab.
Combined with how worldwide tablet shipments expected to reach about 42 million by year's end, TSMC is sure to reap many benefits.
This is in tune with another report that said shipments of DRAM for tablets would multiply by a factor of about nine this year.
Until recently, growth for the chip market was predicted at 5%, but TSMC has now raised that estimate to 7%.
This is because PCs, handsets and consumer electronics will see worldwide growth of 12%, 9% and 6%, respectively.
Of course, the company does not expect all the success to come by itself, which is why it set a capex of US$7.8 billion, 81% of which will go into the 65nm, 45nm and 28nm processes.
What remains to be seen is just how accurate these predictions eventually turn out to be.