As the global economic outlook declines, demand for traditional electronic consumer goods declines, and the chip foundry industry begins to face a wave of order cuts.
According to Taiwan's "Electronic Times", industry leader TSMC recently experienced a rare experience of three major customers adjusting orders at the same time. In terms of mobile phones, Apple has lowered its shipment target for the first batch of 90 million iPhone 14 units, with the order cut reaching 10%. In the field of PC chips, AMD and Nvidia also requested adjustments to their orders due to the sharp decline in PC market demand and the subsidence of the "mining" craze. Among them, AMD reduced its 7/6 nanometer orders by about 20,000 pieces from the fourth quarter of this year to the first quarter of 2023, while Nvidia requested to delay and reduce its first-quarter orders.
Affected by this news, TSMC’s US stocks fell nearly 4% before the market opened on Friday.
Although the three major customers collectively adjusted their orders. However, analysts believe that the impact on TSMC's performance may be quite limited: Apple has revised iPhone 14 orders down as expected by the company; although AMD has adjusted its 7/6 nanometer orders, the key 5 nanometer server orders have not been revised, and the company also accepts TSMC price increase, so the overall impact should not be significant.
TSMC’s order adjustment is not an isolated case. At the performance meeting after the market closed on Thursday, local time, chip giant Micron Technology significantly lowered its financial guidance for the next quarter. The adjusted EPS was US$1.43-1.83, far lower than analysts’ expectations of US$2.57; adjusted revenue was 6.8-7.6 billion. US dollars, also lower than analysts' expectations of US$9.14 billion.
As one of the world's largest manufacturers of memory chips , Micron's products are mainly used in personal computers, smartphones and other devices. In addition, Micron also operates in data centers, electric and connected vehicles, 5G, artificial intelligence Expansion in areas such as achieves growth. The company's sharp lowering of its performance expectations may imply that demand in the chip industry has fallen sharply.
market analysis believes that with the global economic downturn, the market situation in the traditional chip application field will continue to deteriorate in the second half of the year, and the chip industry's destocking and order cutting trend may continue. In addition to some advanced processes and 22/28nm mainstream processes that are still in demand, the demand for chip production capacity of other mature processes will continue to loosen.
Although the high growth rate of the semiconductor market in the past two years has ceased, there are still structured opportunities within the entire industry. As demand for traditional electronic products shrinks, the field of new energy automotive semiconductors still has momentum for continued growth. Comparing the situation of semiconductor chip factories, the inventory turnover days of automotive semiconductor companies such as STMicroelectronics, NXP, and Texas Instruments are still at historically low levels, which also verifies the structural performance of the automotive semiconductor field.
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