In 2019, Huawei has become TSMC's second largest customer, accounting for 14% of TSMC's revenue. Under pressure from the United States, TSMC terminated its cooperation with Huawei in 2020, but the impact of losing Huawei was not revealed in the short term - the production capacity given up by Huawei was soon divided by other customers.
Unexpectedly, TSMC only tasted the consequences of losing Huawei in 2022.
First of all, due to the rising prices of upstream source materials, the cost of chip foundry has increased significantly. In order to maintain the normal operation of the company, TSMC has requested a 10% to 20% increase overall fee to all customers.
However, as TSMC's largest customer, Apple openly sang a negative tune and strongly rejected TSMC's chip price increase.
On the other hand, although TSMC's first generation 3nm process technology has met the conditions for commercial mass production, it has not been recognized by even one customer. The second-generation 3nm (N3E, which has just successfully successfully cut the die, has 18% performance improvement compared to 5nm, has a 34% reduction in power consumption and a 70% increase in density), and its first customers are actually a niche chip such as DSP PHY serial control under Alphawave.
If Huawei is still a customer of TSMC, the latter will be able to take greater initiative in bargaining with Apple, at least there will be no phenomenon of [customer bullying stores].
In addition, Huawei has always been the customer who first launched TSMC's advanced technology. If it is still a customer of TSMC, the first generation 3nm will likely be first launched by the new generation Kirin chip .
