TSMC revenues soar as end of Huawei relationship is confirmed

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has reported year-on-year revenue growth of 28% while also confirming it will no longer supply chips to Huawei after September 14.

The US Government has been making considerable progress to inhibit the progress of China’s telecoms champion in recent months, and this news chalks up another victory. TSMC, a key component of the Huawei supply chain, will officially end its relationship with Huawei on September 14.

Alongside this announcement, the team also boasted attractive financial results for the three-month period ending June 30.

“Our second quarter business was sequentially flat, as the continued 5G infrastructure deployment and HPC-related product launches offset weaknesses in other platforms,” said Wendell Huang, Chief Financial Officer of TSMC. “Moving into third quarter 2020, we expect our business to be supported by strong demand for our industry-leading 5nm and 7nm technologies, driven by 5G smartphones, HPC and IoT-related applications.”

While the company would not have wanted to lose Huawei as a customer, the team has suggested it will still be a positive year. Perhaps this is due to the customers it is retaining.

Although not officially confirmed, Apple is presumed to be TSMC’s largest customer. According to the annual report, TSMC’s largest customer accounted for 23% of 2019 revenues and 22% of 2018 revenues. Assuming the launch of Apple’s 5G device goes ahead in a few months, the remainder of 2020 will look very positive for Apple and TSMC as a result.

Interestingly enough, while losing Huawei as a customer is not ideal, it does appear the sales team have done a decent job of diversifying revenues. Losing Apple as a customer would be a catastrophic event, but as the company manufactured 10,761 different products for 499 distinct customers, losing Huawei is not the end of the world.