Source: Finance Association
① TSMC executives said at an event on Thursday that due to strong demand for artificial intelligence chips, the global semiconductor industry's revenue will increase by 10% this year; ② Nvidia's higher-than-expected earnings report, and news such as South Korea's new subsidy of 19 billion US dollars has driven chip stocks to rise one after another, and the stock prices of many Asian semiconductor companies have reached new highs.
$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$The impressive results have rekindled the market's enthusiasm for artificial intelligence chips. On Thursday, global chip-making giants$Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM.US)$Annual revenue growth in the global semiconductor industry (excluding memory chips) is predicted to reach 10%.
Cliff Hou, senior vice president of TSMC, said at an event that this is a new opportunity and a golden age for artificial intelligence. The company expects sales to increase 30% in the second quarter due to a surge in demand for artificial intelligence chips.
Early Thursday morning, Nvidia announced its first fiscal quarter results report. Revenue, profit, and Q2 guidance all surpassed market expectations. Among them, the revenue forecast for the second fiscal quarter was 28 billion US dollars (± 2%), and analysts' previous forecast was 26.8 billion US dollars, which means that the company's year-on-year growth rate for the second fiscal quarter could reach 172%.
Meanwhile, Asian chip-related stocks and indices rose to their highest levels in three years on Thursday. The Asia Pacific Semiconductor Index once rose 1.7%, reaching its highest level since February 2021.
As one of Nvidia's main suppliers, TSMC's stock price hit a record high of NT$877 on Thursday, closing at NT$875, up 1.27%. Among other technology companies, Hon Hai Precision's stock price rose 2.37%, while MediaTek's share price rose 1.69%.
In the Korean market, chip stocks are also rising, taking advantage of Nvidia's impressive performance and the South Korean government's newly introduced $19 billion subsidy to the chip industry. The stock price of SK Hynix, the world's leading memory supplier, once hit the highest level since 2000, closing up 1.16%. Samsung Electronics, on the other hand, increased its stock price by 0.9% because it began supplying high-bandwidth memory chips to Nvidia.
In Japan, shares of Advantest Corp., a semiconductor test equipment manufacturer that invests heavily in Nvidia, rose 5.36%. The stock price of the technology group SoftBank Group rose more than 4%, while US stocks of its chip design subsidiary Arm rose 3.87% in the premarket, and it has direct business dealings with Nvidia.
Strong momentum
Industry analyst Charles Shum pointed out that Nvidia's performance guidelines and increasing capital expenditure by major companies indicate that market demand for artificial intelligence chips will continue to be strong until at least 2025.
He also believes that as an exclusive OEM for some of Nvidia's key chips, TSMC is expected to achieve 20% sales growth this year, breaking the slow recovery trend of smartphone and PC semiconductors.
Furthermore, Shum also said that if Nvidia's GPUs continue to be in short supply, sales of SK Hynix, which supplies them with high-end HBM chips, will also maintain a positive growth trend next year.
The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics Organization (WSTS) also predicts that the global semiconductor market will grow 13.1% in 2024.
editor/tolk