14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that quite a few companies are experiencing the January effect, so to speak, as revenues are generally falling for everyone, on year, on month or, in the case of particularly unfortunate companies, both.
That January is proving to have been less than overly favorable for pretty much every company out there is something that is no longer a mystery.
Already quite a few companies have reported, or are said to have revealed, that their revenues fell during the past month.
Examples of such IT players include ASUS and Gigabyte and A-Data, and most every motherboard maker expects 'bad' things form the first quarter of 2011 overall.
One reason behind this is the now infamous flaw discovered by Intel to be plaguing its 6-Series Cougar Point chipset.
Now, it is revealed that two well-known semiconductor manufacturers have also reported their revenues for the first month of 2011, and it seems one isn't doing as bad as the other.
The companies in question are TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC).
UMC scores sales of NT$9.53 billion, which is 6.4% lower on month but 10.75% higher on year (January 2010 had NT$8.6 billion).
TSMC posted consolidated revenues of NT$35.37 billion, which is the equivalent of (US$1.23 billion).
Oddly enough, this means an increase of 17.4% on year and of 1.4% over the previous month.
For the entire quarter, TSMC hopes to achieve NT$105-107 billion, more than the NT$92.19 billion of Q1, 2010 but less than during Q4, 2010 (by 3-5%).
As for the whole year, TSMC is aiming for a jump of over 20% in sales, meaning that it wants to clearly surpass the 2010 all-time high of NT$419.54 billion.
As for UMC, it hopes to not suffer more than a single-digit slip in Q1 while the entire Q1 will leave it with a drop of 12-14% overall.