The Beauty of Taiwan

         台積電2020Q4財務報告的片言隻字

         由台積電法說會一窺未來半導體產業榮枯。

         Based on the Company’s current business outlook, management expects the overall performance for first quarter 2021 to be as follows:
             Revenue is expected to be between US$12.7 billion and US$13.0 billion;
             And, based on the exchange rate assumption of 1 US dollar to 27.95 NT dollars,
             Gross profit margin is expected to be between 50.5% and 52.5%;
             Operating profit margin is expected to be between 39.5% and 41.5%.

         The management further expects the 2021 capital budget to be between US$25 billion and US$28 billion.

         Now I will talk about our 2021 outlook. For the full year of 2021, we forecast the overall semiconductor market, excluding memory, to grow about 8%, while foundry industry growth is forecast to be about 10%. For TSMC, we are confident we can outperform the foundry revenue growth and grow by mid-teens percentage in 2021 in U.S. dollar term. Our 2021 business will be supported by strong demand for our industry-leading advanced and specialty technologies, where we see stronger interest from all 4 growth platforms, which are smartphone, HPC, automotive and IoT.

         Next, let me talk about TSMC's long-term growth outlook. We are entering a period of higher growth as a multiyear megatrend of 5G and HPC-related applications are expected to fuel strong demand for our advanced technologies in the next several years. We expect global smartphone units to grow 10% year-over-year in 2021. We forecast the penetration rate for 5G smartphone of the total smartphone market to rise from 18% in 2020 to more than 35% in 2021. We expect the silicon content of a 5G smartphone to continue to increase as compared to a 4G smartphone.

         We continue to expect faster penetration of 5G smartphone as compared to 4G over the next several years as 5G smartphone benefit from the significant performance, bandwidth and latency improvement of 5G networks to drive more AI applications and more cloud services. We believe 5G is a multiyear megatrend that will enable a world where digital computation is increasingly ubiquitous, which will fuel the growth of all 4 of our growth platforms in the next several years.

         As we enter the 5G era, a smarter and more intelligent world will require massive increases in computation power and greater need for energy-efficient computing and, therefore, require leading-edge technologies. Thus, HPC is an increasingly important driver of TSMC's long-term growth and the largest contributor in terms of our incremental revenue growth.

         With our technology leadership, we are well positioned to capture the growth from the favorable industry megatrend. We now expect our long-term revenue growth to be 10% to 15% CAGR from 2020 to 2025 in U.S. dollar terms.

         Now I will talk about our N3 status. N3 will be another full node stride from our N5 with up to 70% logic density gain, up to 15% performance gain and up to 30% power reduction as compared with 5-nanometer. Our N3 technology will use FinFET transistor structure to deliver the best technology maturity, performance and cost for our customers. Our N3 technology development is on track with good progress. We are seeing a much higher level of customer engagement for both HPC and smartphone application at N3 as compared with N5 and N7 at a similar stage. Risk production is scheduled in 2021, and volume production is targeted in the second half of 2022.

         Our 3-nanometer technology will be the most advanced foundry technology in both PPA and transistor technology when it is introduced. Thus, we are confident our 3-nanometer will be another large and long-lasting node for TSMC.

         Finally, I will talk about TSMC 3DFabric. TSMC has developed an industry-leading and comprehensive wafer-level 3D IC technology road map to enhance system-level performance. Our differentiated chiplets and heterogeneous integration technology drive better, power-efficient and smaller-form-factor benefit for our customer while shortening their time to market. This technology is including chip-stacking solution such as SoIC as well as advanced packaging solutions such as InFO and CoWoS. We observed chiplets are becoming an industry trend. We are working with several customers on 3DFabric to enable chiplet architecture.

         SoIC's more volume production is targeted 2022. SoIC is expected to be first adopted by HPC applications, where our bandwidth performance, power efficiency and form factor are aggressively pursued. We expect revenue from our back-end services, which are including both advanced packaging and testing, to grow at the rate higher than corporate average in the next few years.