Yesterday, January 13, the Taiwanese company TSMC published its quarterly report for the fourth quarter of 2021, summed up the overall results of the past year and spoke about plans for 2022. Quite expectedly, the largest chip manufacturer in the world showed excellent results – in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, the company’s revenues amounted to $ 15.7 billion (this is 24.1% more than last year) – almost half was obtained from the production of chips using technological processes 7 nm and 5 nm. And, most interestingly, the manufacturer’s net profit amounted to $ 6.01 billion (an increase of 16.4% over the same period in 2020).
The company’s report states that among all categories in which TSMC products participate, the automotive sector showed the greatest growth – revenue in this segment increased by 51%. At the same time, the largest profit still comes from the segment of the production of processors for smartphones and HPC (high-performance computer systems – processors for NVIDIA and AMD video cards, chips of the Apple M1 family and not only). In fact, TSMC paid special attention to Apple processors in the TSMC report, pointing out that the company’s ARM processor brought a certain balance of power into a category where x86 architecture previously dominated.
And although the year has passed incredibly successfully, the net profit breaks every conceivable record, and the demand for chips still catastrophically exceeds the supply, TSMC does not plan to stop there. During the quarterly report, company officials said the giant will invest $ 44 billion in capacity expansion in 2022. It is worth recalling that in 2021, the company’s capital investment in expanding production amounted to only (so to speak) $ 30 billion. And, of course, most of the investments (80% of the total) will be spent on increasing production capacity in the field of modern technological processes – the company plans to produce even more chips using 7nm, 5nm, 3nm and, of course, 2 nm.
Another 10% of the total will be allocated for development in the field of packaging and production of image sensors (CMOS and radio frequency RF). However, such an impressive investment looks very appropriate against the background of an impressive shortage of semiconductors – only NVIDIA paid TSMC an advance of $ 3 billion for the production of chips for the RTX 4000 line of video cards, and the total amount of advance payments in 2021 alone amounted to $ 6.7 billion.
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