The world’s largest contract chipmaker, Taiwan’s TSMC, reported largely flat fourth-quarter revenue on Wednesday, but analysts were unruffled as the firm still beat both its own and the market’s expectations.
The chipmaker, whose customers include Apple and Nvidia, has benefited from a boom in artificial intelligence applications that has helped it weather the tapering off of pandemic-led demand.
Revenue in the final three months of last year came in at $20.10 billion, according to Reuters calculations, compared with $19.93 billion in the year-ago period.
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That beat Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC) previous prediction for fourth-quarter revenue being in a range of between $18.8-19.6 billion, and also beat an LSEG SmartEstimate of T$617.1 billion drawn from 21 analysts.
SmartEstimates give greater weighting to forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.
For December alone, TSMC reported that revenue fell 8.4% year-on-year to T$176.3 billion, which was down 14.4% compared with the previous month.
TSMC, Asia’s most valuable publicly listed company with a market capitalisation of $491 billion, did not provide any details or forward guidance in its brief revenue statement.
It is due to report fourth-quarter earnings on January 18, where it will also update its outlook for the current quarter and the year.
TSMC’s Taipei-listed shares closed down 0.3% on Wednesday ahead of the release of the sales data. The broader market ended down 0.4%. The shares surged 32% in 2023, compared with a 27% gain for the broader market.
- Reuters with additional editing by Sean O’Meara
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