TSMC Chairman Mark Liu on the revolution in semiconductors
5G and A.I. will open huge possibilities for business—but not without chipmaking breakthroughs.
fortune.com
TSMC chairman Mark Liu describes how the world’s largest chipmaker is reimagining the semiconductor industry
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Fred Stein
Member
Thanks for the link to article.
Mark Liu convinces me that TSM is one of the best investments to make at this time. TSM has: 1) The best technology; 2) The best talent pool; 3) The best vision; 4) The best yields; 5) The focus; 6) The best customers; 7) The highest utilization rates; 8) The best capital structure in a highly capital intensive industry. Did I leave anything out? Any risks are more than priced-in.
Mark Liu convinces me that TSM is one of the best investments to make at this time. TSM has: 1) The best technology; 2) The best talent pool; 3) The best vision; 4) The best yields; 5) The focus; 6) The best customers; 7) The highest utilization rates; 8) The best capital structure in a highly capital intensive industry. Did I leave anything out? Any risks are more than priced-in.
hist78
Well-known member
~ The best ecosystem
Absolutely.
hist78
Well-known member
One interesting thing that's not totally related to our discussion is the financial reporting. I knew it but didn't recognize the consequences. It is the financial reporting frequency for a public traded company.
In Taiwan, it's required to publish the previous month revenue by the 10th of each month. It provides a better visibility for investors to measure a company operations. So by the middle of June, we already knew the quarterly revenue trends for TSMC, UMC, and Mediatek.
On the opposite side is Intel. In the middle of June, Intel second quarter revenue is still a guessing game towards the negative side.
I think a monthly revenue reporting frequency can make a company think and act differently.
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Intel reports their revenues quaterly just like every other public company in US. The disparity in the success/failure of the US companies clearly proves that the frequency of the reporting has no bearing on the business success. For whatever reason you decided to compare TSMC with Intel. Why not AMD? Quaterly reporting, yet they handily outperformed TSMC (stock prise wise) over the last two years.
This is quite interesting point I think. Monthly revenue reporting can burden company staffs a bit, but this helps 'outsiders' to understand what's happening inside of TSMC. If Intel manufacturing fails, then we'll see revenue impact 3 months later, but TSMC, we'll know that in a month. Samsung doesn't report foundry revenue(Memory + non memory). Also, TSMC quarterly reports include 'by technology' and 'by application' contribution. It's hard to lie in this situation.
hist78
Well-known member
As far as I know most companies perform month-end process for accounting operations and tax reporting purposes. I think there is a bigger problem if for ten days after the end of last month a company can't figure out their sales number.
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Asian companies in general have that ability to hunker in, survive in very low margin industries, and slowly grow for years until they corner the market. Lots of modern day leaders from the region were very anonymous companies, not know even to industry insiders.
No rockstar C-levels, 10x engineers, or fancy silicon valley startup twist.
People were telling me 15 years ago: "silicon is too hard, too unprofitable, and too boring. You will never get a resume to join an MNC"