Taiwan Semiconductor released earnings this week and will test the recent AI bull market.
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TSM trades at $140.14 after breaking through uptrend support levels.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and companies like Foxconn are looking to expand abroad. Suppliers of chips and electronics tools, materials, and plant builders are also looking abroad.
Ming-Kuen Lai, Acter’s general manager, said his company’s Southeast Asian business surged 50% last year, outperforming the core markets of Taiwan and China. “This growth is expected to continue in 2024,” Lai said.
Geopolitical tensions and a focus on supply chain resilience have shifted the tech industry. After decades of reliance on China and Taiwan, electronic assemblers such as Foxconn and Quanta set up operations in other areas of Asia and Europe.
A potential cash boost is coming after the Biden administration announced that the company will receive a subsidy of up to $6.6 billion from the US government to support a planned $65 billion investment in Arizona.
The $6.6 billion is a small fraction of the $48 billion TSMC holds in cash and equivalents on its books. According to Trend Force, the company is also a dominant chip player, with 16 million wafers built in 2023, marking around 61% of all third-party chip production.
The recent earnings release will put AI-related pressure on TSMC. If the numbers disappoint traders, this could add to recent tech selling.
The world’s largest chipmaker, whose customers include Apple and Nvidia, has benefited from a surge in AI projects. These projects have helped TSMC hold off a pandemic-led demand slump and pushed its stock to a record high.
In the first three months of this year, revenue came in at T$592.64 billion ($18.54 billion), up from $16.72 billion in the year-ago period.
For March alone, TSMC reported revenue rose 34.3% year-on-year to T$195.21 billion, up 7.5% from the previous month.
TSMC, Asia’s most valuable publicly listed company with a market capitalization of $662 billion, did not provide any details or forward guidance in its brief revenue statement.
Taiwan chipmaker TSMC reported a 16.5% rise in first-quarter revenue on Wednesday, beating market expectations and at the high end of the company’s guidance as its sales boom on demand for artificial intelligence applications.
