Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world's largest contract chipmaker, reported a fourth-quarter revenue of T$625.5 billion ($20.10 billion).
Despite being largely flat, this figure exceeded both the market's expectations. The Q4 revenue also surpassed TSMC's previous forecast of $18.8-19.6 billion.
For December alone, TSMC reported a year-on-year revenue decline of 8.4% to T$176.3 billion, down 14.4% from the previous month.
The company is due to report full Q4 earnings on Jan. 18. Its Taipei-listed shares closed down 0.3% on Wednesday ahead of the release of the sales data.
“This result mirrors our prior commentary anticipating a strong CQ4 for the company tied to Apple seasonality, continued growth in demand for AI solutions, and better Chinese handset dynamics,” analysts at Wedbush said in a note.
“We continue to have a more optimistic outlook for 2024 around servers, PCs, and handsets (TSMC's most significant end markets). With intermediate to longer term technology trends requiring an increase in semiconductor content (AI, IoT, FSD and EVs, AR/VR, etc.), also favoring TSMC and with little threat to TSMC's dominance in leading nodes through 2024 into 2025, we see no reason to deviate from our positive stance on the name.”