Taiwan foundries saw sales slide in April
By Sun Pai-yi
EE Times
(05/09/01 11:32 a.m. EST)
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Sales at the world's top two semiconductor foundries continued to slide in April, dropping 12 percent at United Microelectronics Corp. and 21 percent at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.
The results confirmed many expectations that the second quarter would begin with a whimper and then painfully limp forward as the foundries try to keep operating margins from evaporating. TSMC offered no additional guidance for May beyond what its chairman, Morris Chang, said last week at an investors conference. After explaining gloomy first-quarter results, Chang said he believed the semiconductor industry slump would hit bottom in April or May. With TSMC's fab utilization rate expected to hover around 50 percent in the second quarter, analyst Eric Wang with ABN AMRO said Chang may be right. "Now is the realization of the worst," Wang said. "I expect a mild recovery in the third quarter, and a relatively strong rebound in the fourth."
But Gartner Dataquest is forecasting a modest recovery in 2002. On Tuesday (May 8), the research firm once again revised its estimate of industry performance, saying a 17 percent decline was likely for this year, followed by a slow uptick. "In the third and fourth quarters TSMC's sales will be a little bit higher," said Henry Wang, an analyst at Entrust Securities. "But . . . there will be only a moderate recovery."
April's numbers marked the fourth month of declining or flat revenues for TSMC. Sales for the month totaled $281 million, down from $358 million in March, but up 4 percent from a year ago. At UMC, sales totaled $177 million in April, down from $200 million in March and off 21 percent from a year ago.
Both companies have predicted that sales in the second quarter would decline roughly 25-to-30 percent from the first quarter. |
