14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the month of November is returning mixed results for the many members of the IT market, and TSMC, this once, made it into the group of those with less than exceptional marketing performance.
After it got over the last of its problems with the 40nm process several months back, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company hasn't had any other major yield issues.
Even so, however, it appears to have failed to return an on-month growth in revenues during the month of November, though it did jump a fair bit compared to last year.
Basically, TSMC gathered consolidated revenues of NT$36.85 billion for November, which is the equivalent of US$1.23 billion.
On-year, this means an increase of 21.5%, which is quite a solid jump, although understandable knowing how generally slow last year was, even despite showing improvements over 2008.
On the other hand, compared to October, 2010, the figure is 4.1% smaller. Fortunately, this did not prevent consolidated revenues for all the previous months combined from returning a solid growth on-year.
During the third quarter alone, TSMC gathered a record high of NT$112.25 billion, and this contributed to the overall performance for the January-November period.
To be more specific, the foundry grew by 45.6% compared to last year, to a total of NT$384.67 billion.
As for the fourth quarter, the company set a guidance of NT$107-109 billion. Whether or not that figure is reached obviously depends on the sales during December.
Fortunately, TSMC makes many chips for NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices, so it will not be as affected as other companies by the generally weak semiconductor demand, at least not as much as Samsung and other players that deal in DRAM and NAND chips.
In related news, United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) also saw a revenue drop and TSMC's shares closed up 2.9% at NT$70 on December 9.