The mobile phone industry is sluggish this year. It is currently estimated that domestic mobile phone manufacturers will ship 200 million units less than last year, so major mobile phone manufacturers are cutting orders. Of course, manufacturers will not place orders. Chip manufacturers such as MediaTek and Qualcomm will naturally reduce their chip production capacity, so the number of orders from TSMC, as a foundry, will naturally decrease. However, TSMC will not only cut orders for mobile phone chips . At present, the consumption trend of the entire IT industry is relatively weak. It is not just Android mobile phone chips that are cutting orders in large quantities. TSMC's other major customers are also not polite, Apple , AMD and NVIDIA have both cut their orders from TSMC.
Apple has now started the production of iPhone 14 series mobile phones, and TSMC is also stepping up the production capacity of A15 and A16 chips. However, Apple originally expected to ship 100 million iPhone 14 mobile phones in the second half of the year, but it may be seeing the global economic downturn. Therefore, the target of shipping 100 million units was reduced to 90 million units. This reduced the plan by 10%, and chip orders were naturally reduced by 10%. However, this may not be a problem for TSMC. After all, Apple’s orders will be reduced in the future. Keep up. The real trouble for
is AMD and NVIDIA, the other two big customers. AMD is reported to have cut orders for 7nm and 6nm process CPUs and GPU chips from the fourth quarter of this year to the first quarter of next year, with a scale of approximately 20,000 wafers . The reason why AMD cut orders is mainly due to the severe decline in PC demand and the current serious inventory. After the mining disaster, everyone's interest in buying graphics cards and waned. AMD had previously released new GPUs and CPUs, and market digestion also took a while. Therefore, AMD was pessimistic about the market in the second half of the year and naturally had to cut its own output. With the scale of goods, cutting orders has become inevitable.
NVIDIA is not like AMD in both CPU and GPU, but the impact of the mining disaster on RTX 30 is still very large. At present, NVIDIA's inventory has reached the edge of saturation. NVIDIA is more concerned about how to digest its own inventory and that of manufacturers, rather than shipping RTX 40 graphics cards on a large scale. NVIDIA's RTX 40 series GPU, which uses 5nm technology, was originally planned to be released in September this year, but now it may be postponed by a quarter and will not be released until 2023. This is mainly to digest the measures made by the RTX 30 graphics card, so TSMC naturally also I can't get orders from NVIDIA.
In addition, like AMD, NVIDIA is also not optimistic about the global PC market, so not only has it postponed the release of the RTX 40 graphics card, but orders in the first quarter of next year are also said to have dropped a lot. Of course, for TSMC, NVIDIA is currently mainly delaying. If the RTX 40 graphics card is well received, it is not ruled out that orders will be added back. However, the RTX 40 graphics card is initially a flagship card, and it is not easy to obtain good sales.
Of course, TSMC is also actively looking for countermeasures. On the one hand, TSMC has stated that it will not respond to market rumors. On the other hand, TSMC is also accelerating customers of other processes and actively requires customers to switch from 40nm process to 28nm. However, the market environment is currently like this. Manufacturers say that mobile phone sales have dropped by 5% this year, and PC sales have dropped by 10%. If this is the case, at least the foundries will not make as much money as they did in the past!
