TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

Post by astrange » Fri, Apr 02, 2021, 12:09 AM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #79

rcxdude wrote: post #36

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The story is not anywhere near that straightforward for semiconduction fabrication. A huge portion of that fabrication, for example, just moved out of california to other places in the US. Also there's been a general consolodation of fabrication plants over time as more and more advanced nodes put the price of a plant up by orders of magnitudes. There just isn't enough money for the same number of fabs at the bleedin…

> There just isn't enough money for the same number of fabs at the bleeding edge. There definitely is but it will come at the cost of share buy backs and keeping share price up which affects compensation of management. Failure to keep the share price up by investing in manufacturing in US will also invite predatory share holders to topple the management. The cult of "free" markets driving wealth growth at the top of…

Post by astrange » Fri, Apr 02, 2021, 12:23 AM UTC

insert_coin wrote: post #61

Guthur wrote: post #55

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Doom doom money doom doom. Nonsense. Top 10 companies https://fxssi.com/top-10-most-valuable-companies-in-the-worl... Most of these are providing goods and services that 100s millions of people are getting value from, with the possible exception of Facebook :p As an aside I must admit I had never heard of Delta Electronics before at all; nearly 50 years old and 5th most valuable company. Out of the top 10 you do get…

Those companies, maybe with the exception of Facebook and Microsoft, are literally only possible because of paper money. Take out the paper they hold from their balance sheets and their size goes down in half. Take away their ability to own their markets by issuing debt bonds, which would mean competing with the revenue generated by their own products, and you kill them. Apple became the biggest company in the world…

Post by fomine3 » Fri, Apr 02, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

oivey wrote: post #130

eloff wrote: post #125

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On the bright side, the new processes will have a longer life. When your 135nm process is replaced by 14nm within a less than a decade, there's a huge gap there and the old process isn't worth much. If you go from 14nm to 2nm, you can still use 14nm for a lot of price sensitive customers.

The density increase is similar between those two jumps, isn’t it? Density significantly drives the price of chips since you can use it to create more chips per wafer. Maybe developing chips at 2 nm will be much more difficult due to quantum effects?

Post by insert_coin » Fri, Apr 02, 2021, 12:46 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #232

insert_coin wrote: post #45

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One word: Financialization. The 70s started the trend of financializing (is that the word?) everything, that meant that at every step of every productive process someone packaged it into a tradable "paper", which got packaged with other paper from other productive processes and then re-sold and repackaged again and again to the market as proxies of the value from those productive processes. Holding paper assets turne…

> Now we are at the end, and the signal? companies are adding bitcoin to their balance sheets. The cycle of finacialization is complete, paper is no longer required and you don't even have to outsource your production, not that you have it anyways, as all you need to post profits and pretend you are a good CEO is buy crypto and hodl. This literally isn't possible because of how GAAP accounting rules work for bitcoin.…

Post by ReptileMan » Fri, Apr 02, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

kyrra wrote: post #80

Kliment wrote: post #73

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Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that demand for cars would go down, and because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots…

Just in time delivery has its downfalls when vendors have issues, but this is a known trade-off to that model. If a company keeps inventory on hand, then they have the worry of owning excess parts that they can never use and is a sink cost later. So these companies can lose money with either, it just depends on the circumstances that cause it. I'd be interested to learn more about the order cancellation you were sayi…