14 DAY TRIAL // Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is, most likely, one of the companies that have aroused the most conflicting feelings in graphics-card makers and consumers over the past year. This is mostly owed to the fact that, although it has some of the most advanced manufacturing process technologies and supplies chips to both NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices, it has had such a large share of process-related problems that all of its customers saw their marketing performance inevitably hindered. Amidst all of these occurrences, however, it seems that, ironically, TSMC itself has not just escaped any real consequences, but it actually thrived, to the point where it beat its revenue estimates for the past quarter.
Initially, revenues were projected at NT$89-91 billion, but this plan failed to come to fruition, in a good way in fact, when TSMC accumulated consolidated revenues of NT$92.19 billion, which is the equivalent of roughly US$3 million. On an unconsolidated basis, TSMC reached NT$30.82 billion in March and revenues of NT$89.18 billion for the entire first quarter. This corresponds to on-year increases of no less than 126.3% and 137.4%, respectively, with the sequential growth, for March, being of 5.6%.
As far as consolidated sales are concerned, the situation is just about at the same level. For March, the foundry chip maker reported an on-month surge of 5.9% and an on-year jump of a noteworthy 124.8%. This led to total consolidated sales of NT$ 31.92 billion. As for the full first three months of the ongoing year, they were 133.4% higher than the NT$39.5 billion registered during the same period of the prior year, namely the first quarter of 2009.
No doubt, these numbers were reached because, for all the troubles with the 40nm manufacturing process, TSMC is still the exclusive supplier of graphics chips to both AMD and NVIDIA. If these two keep demand strong, and the semiconductor maker resolves said problems once and for all, it will most likely keep growing.