Expensive wafers bring TSMC a record year
TSMC has achieved an enormous 90 billion US dollars in sales in 2024 – and is also earning splendidly again. 3 nm production is now running at full speed.
(Image: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd.)
The world's largest chip contract manufacturer is doing better than ever before. TSMC generated a good 90 billion US dollars in revenue in 2024. That is 19 percent more than in the previous record year of 2022 and 30 percent more than in the weak year of 2023, when the entire industry was doing worse.
Net profit is a more mixed picture. TSMC also set a record here, but only just compared to 2022: 36.5 billion US dollars in 2024 – one billion more than then. Among other things, this is due to higher research expenses (6.4 billion instead of 5.5 billion), administrative costs (3 billion instead of 2.1 billion) and higher taxes (7.3 billion instead of 4.3 billion).
2023, on the other hand, was a downward outlier. In that year, TSMC made a net profit of 26.6 billion US dollars.
Many expensive wafers
Revenue is rising because TSMC is increasing its production on the one hand and earning more money per wafer sold on the other. In the first quarter of 2024, TSMC started with a good three million silicon wafers (300 mm equivalent) and ultimately increased capacity to a good 3.4 million wafers in the fourth quarter. TSMC produced a total of 12.9 million wafers.
Most of the money is generated by expensive chips with 3-nanometer technology. In the last quarter, their share was 26 percent; over the year as a whole, it was 18 percent. However, it is also rumored that TSMC has raised prices for older process generations.
(Image:Â TSMC)
AI is king
After a sluggish 2023, HPC (+58%) and smartphone chips (+23%) generated by far the highest year-on-year growth. Under HPC, TSMC combines all processors, graphics chips and accelerators from notebooks to servers. TSMC generated half of its turnover with such HPC chips.
The chip contract manufacturer benefits considerably from the demand for Nvidia's AI accelerators. TSMC is also continuing to expand its packaging capacity for Nvidia in order to accommodate more and more of the chips produced on common carriers.
(Image:Â TSMC)
Rosy outlook delights the stock market
In its outlook, TSMC makes it clear that the AI hype will continue for the time being: Growth in corresponding hardware is expected to cushion the seasonal decline in smartphones. The manufacturer expects sales of between 25 billion and 25.8 billion US dollars –, which would be an average of 35% more than at the beginning of 2024.
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For the full year 2025, TSMC is planning a capital budget of between 38 billion and 42 billion US dollars, primarily for the construction of new semiconductor plants. TSMC's share price rose by a good 5 percent following the announcement of the business figures. The share price of the most important machine supplier ASML behaved similarly.
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