Stefan Mileschin

Despite a downturn in Apple sales

Despite the fact that Apple lost sales on its over-priced iPhone X, its number one partner TSMC is rumoured to be about to score record profits in 2018.

There were some worries that after Jobs' Mob reduced its orders, TSMC might be set to announce a flat set of financials for this year. It turns out that the company has been ramping up volume production of the 7nm process in the second half of the year to fulfil other orders from Apple for fabricating A12 application processors for its 2018 new iPhone models. The 7nm plant is also seeing strong orders from Qualcomm's new-generation smartphone chips.

The rumours that is expecting to see its revenue ratio for advanced 7nm process hit a high of 20 percent in 2018, and may post better-than-projected revenues and profits for the second half of the year and register annual revenue growth of over 10 percent.

Some of the doom and gloom stems from the fact that TSMC lowered its revenue growth forecast for 2018 to 10 percent from the earlier projection of 10-15 percent mostly due to weak smartphone demand in the second quarter and growing uncertainty facing the cryptocurrency mining market. Other issues included MediaTek's lacklustre performance in capturing orders for its latest AI-based Helio P60 SoCs from China smartphone vendors in the second quarter.

But MediaTek is now optimistic that its gross margin and revenues would pick up drastically starting in the second quarter of 2018, as China smartphone vendors including Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo had claimed to mass adopt MediaTek's Helio 60 chips, prompting the design house to book a foundry capacity of over 30,000 wafers fabricated using TSMC's 12nm process.

https://fudzilla.com/news/46115-tsmc...record-profits