TSMC Reports Q3 Earnings [pdf]
investor.tsmc.com
investor.tsmc.com
Still surprised how profitable TSMC is. Especially as this seems to be below the market expectations (their stock is still falling).
Aren't they profitable because they are in a unique position? I would hope they keep being profitable. What happens if they would fail?
It’s not unusual to see 70%+ margins in software products.
It's just a useful tidbit, related to the point they specifically quoted.
I'm assuming they write the best custom chip design software and that's their biggest competitive advantage (and then operational excellence and savvy business maneuvering et cetera). Though I know nothing about them just guessing as an outsider.
Meaning what? The factory gets destroyed? A competitor appears? Labor costs rise? Demand falls?
So long as the world economy is dependent on the TSMC, a CCP invasion seems unlikely if that's what you mean. The profitability isn't the clearest way to measure that. It could fall for a number of reasons without the geopolitical context changing.
For example, investors may be afraid that there might be some ominous signals coming at this week's National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held every five years.
Republic of China move to Taiwan since 1945. that's over 70+ years. that's one person born and into retired age.
you can question every country on Earth for its long term uncertainty. North Korea constantly shoot off Nukes. Russia is invading Ukraine now. Saudi and Yemen.
American just recently left Afghanistan to Taliban after 20+ yrs of Nation building.
70+ yrs peaceful times in Taiwan with some up and down with China seem pretty stable to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan#Republic_of_China_(1945...
edit: even USA have some long term uncertainty after Jan 6 (United States Capitol attack or protest?) Trump-backed election deniers is about to be elected into the US Congress.
The USA's financialized short-term thinking has resulted in a failure to develop basic technological infrastructure capability, and China is now in the lead - so the response is, stop trading with China on all things silicon? This is the Tonya Harding team's 'let's try to win by kneecapping our superior competition' mentality, and it's doomed to failure, if not in the short term, than certainly in the long term.
This move might delay it happening by a few months. Combine with lots of other small moves, and the USA might get another few years of world superpower status, even if the moves hurt both countries in the end.
We'll see.
Lots of people thought Japan would overtake the US as well, and that didn't exactly pan out.
China has some real problems between the legacy of their one child policy and their current real estate investment crisis. It's certainly possible that they overcome those issues, but it's far from guaranteed.
I was of the view that China could be the next super power and overtake the US.
But two things changed my view:-
1. COVID and their response to it. China still does not have a good vaccine and they still rely on lockdowns. That speaks a lot to how backward China is in basic sciences.
2. The move to remove term limits for the president. History tells us that one person can’t be relied on to make good long term decisions for a country specially a communist country.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/11/592694991...
I think this was a policy move more than a lack of science understanding. In fact, leadership in China is very science-heavy. Time will tell, but it's actually looking like possibly a good move, now that 5% of the UK population is not working due to long term sickness, the highest ever[1], and covid is looking like a contributory factor.
I could even imagine China extending their lockdown policy to other diseases which might have long term population-wide effects, like influenza.
The main downside of such a policy is you need to have effectively closed borders forever, otherwise travellers re-introduce diseases from other countries into yours.
India is by the way the only major economy that is projected to grow over 6% next year. That's largely due to profiting off of resell of Russian goods.
The problem is that people conflate their own moral standing with actual factual realities and unfortunately it will cost _us_ dearly.
Russia's economy is trivial in size, as are their non-energy exports.
A $20-$30 gap in the price of oil via artificially cheap Russian oil isn't the difference between India's large economy (3x larger than Russia, nearly the size of Germany) growing at -3% vs growing at +6%.
We need to put the hammer down far harder on Russia than we have so far.
Of course GDP isn’t the only factor in world power status, but it sure is a big one.
Compared to the US, China also has a far larger labor force, a greater ability to manufacture things, and greater government control over its population.
Access to natural resources is similar for many things, less for some (like oil and gas) but greater for others (like rare earth minerals).
If worldwide carbon caps and tariffs become a thing, the oil and gas in the ground suddenly becomes nearly worthless if you can't use it.
Whereas China has a huge amount of not-good-for-much desert and mountains which could become a solar powerhouse.
It may be worth less, but it won't be worthless. I have a hard time seeing another fuel source for long distance aviation (although we may move to synthesized fuel in the future).
Companies will also need feedstock for plastics - that use won't be affected by carbon caps at all.
You can still have them, but ultimately it's the people in western societies that will pay the price with their own pensions and social services gradually degrading.
2nd and 3rd world countries are going to bathe in cheap oil when/if the 1st world bans it.
How do you plan on enforcing the bans globally?
"Don't emit more than your fair share of carbon" is just another rule like the others. If most countries agree, but there are a few dissenters, we can deal with it like other international disagreements - warnings, then sanctions, then war.
Currently, we're far from that, because we don't have a majority of countries agreeing on carbon caps.
It happened to Venezuela because they refused to align with US interests, and with other economic and political issues, they were an easy target. The wikipedia page [1] has a nice summary of the list of countries on each side of the dispute, and you can see a nice 'pro USA' and 'anti USA' divide.
What exact advantages do you see in that?
They have sufficient control of their population that if they said "everyone of child bearing age must try for a child this year and next", they'd probably double their population within 2 years.
The 'demographic problem' is only a problem because they don't see it as an issue worth fixing.
Lots of them don’t want to have kids. The government has many ways to influence the public. But I don’t think it’s true to say that they have so much control over their populace that they could do anything like double their population in 20 years, let alone 2.
People in China are just people, right? Many of them don’t want to have kids. What’s the government gonna do?
Of course, hypothetically, the government blocks people from leaving the country and literally forces them to procreate but that’s getting a bit imaginative (it would be turning the China that exists today into something very different).
Realistically I think the government is worried about their demographic problem and is using every reasonable tool in their arsenal to attempt to address it.
See the Cultural Revolution and Great Famine etc for examples of what it can do. Basically anything.
Even assuming China is all powerful and can achieve "anything" here, the policies would still have a latency of an entire generation. Unless you include time-travel as part of "anything".
We've studied this, n1 reason peolle dont have kids is housing.
The housing crisis has done more damage to western economy than the black plague.
> they'd probably double their population within 2 years.
you are conveniently forgetting that children take 20 years before they can work??
Providing housing to young families will not make a meaningful dent to declining demographics in the affluent world. People do not want to have so many children (3-5 or more) and it's not due to lack of housing. That's a cultural change and no amount of housing is going to reverse it. And even in the financial scenario, the housing aspect is only one chunk of the huge cost of raising several children.
Then why do we simultaneously import millions of workers each year to make up for the supposed shortage of natural population growth (caused by policy)?
That said, while undocumented immigrants tend to be less educated being able to work when we didn’t pay for any of their education is still a boon. It’s something of a waste to pay for 12 years of education and then have someone doing manual labor.
The per capita quality of life has been stagnant for like 20 years. Housing crisis does not boost quality of life at all
> People do not want to have so many children (3-5 or more) and it's not due to lack of housing.
We've conducted polling and studied the issue. You don't need 5 kids, you need 2.1 for replacement rate
"The stress of housing problems is preventing almost 2m people from having children, the Affordable Housing Commission has claimed"
https://www.mortgagestrategy.co.uk/news/housing-stress-preve...
Family planning / One Child Policy = concentrating resources on only kids = PRC now produces comparable STEM talent as all OECD countries combined. Demographic bomb collapists narrative fixate on absolute population decline without realizing PRC is starting to undergo the largest (by an order of magnitude) high-skill demographic divident in "recorded history" that will last decades. Meanwhile reducing net population = declining import dependency over time = more strategic (military) flexbility. Combine with massive home ownership % and high savings rate, and most of population likely settle around middle / low high income = no expectation for onerous social safety nets.
Over the next 10-30 years, we will see PRC (even with shit tier TFR) close/lead in technology due to having the largest and likely best talent pool (courtesy of PRC scale), that exceeds what US can produce domestically + immigration. Which will also erode western dominance/economy for high value niches it tried to fence off for itself. Also a PRC with increasingly less import vunerability due to lower absolute population, which mitigates much of the geographic shortcomings, i.e. first island chain "containment" nations that will be forever import dependant will lose their geographic leverage. Meanwhile increasingly burdensome social nets will drag down / destablize developed economies vs PRC who can sustain domestic serenity on relatively lean welfare estate.
Yes, generally, PRC nationals (Tier 2/3/4 cities) will (continue) to have worse QOL relative to developed societies. But in terms of overtaking US, and improving existing strategic enviroment, demographic trends are pointing up, up, up.
not even comparable situations, Japan has a fraction of the population, natural resources, isn't a nuclear power, and is effectively militarily occupied by the US to this day. People using Japan as a comparison to China are either naive or just coping with reality to comfort themselves
they act as if with that assumption, but in fact what really happens is everyone loses. it's a lose-lose scenario
A large chunk of experts do not see China as the likely world next superpower, many experts are debating if China will survive as a unified nation in the next decades.
China has finally admitted to lying about their population for decades, they have some of the worst demographics in the world, along with the single worst food security and greatest debt load in recorded history.
No serious person outside of anonymous online forums would ever describe any of these things as ingredients to success, and this is k my a small sampling of their long term problems.
This is even ignoring India, a country with much better strategic advantages and an actually growing population.
The idea that China was next was popular by experts in 2005.
It's a terrible thing that none of us wants, but happens anyways.
It's not very productive in the long run, however - for example, a tank is only 'economically productive' if your economic model is based largely on raiding other country's resources. A tractor, or construction crane, however gives added economic value because it can be used to improve agricultural production, build better infrastructure to facilitate trade, etc.
I love Shelling out: The origins of money blog post from Nick Szabo as it's a great explanation of how having a hard monetary system with small inflation shared by everybody the parties to be more peaceful.
US had a trade relation with China where China was buying US bonds, but as US was issuing lots of new bonds China lost trust, and started selling it thereby opting out of the US bonds based monetary system.
Ignorant people used to joke that China owned the US because of their treasury position (despite the fact that Japan's holdings were roughly as large). Well that position has been massively diluted over the past decade and is now largely meaningless. The Fed can eat China's position with a snap of its finger.
It's to China's benefit to hold the position, at present.
China notably has no domestic gas/oil to speak of, and coal has so many obvious drawbacks that they've decided to push money into renewable R&D as part of their long-term strategy.
If you want to interject into a discussion with some new, interesting argument, that's one thing.
Interjecting into a discussion which you weren't involved in in the first place, just to say that you don't want to respond to it, is frankly bizarre.
"Force people to try to come up with alternatives rather than rely on that single external source that short-term thinking created" seems a lot smarter than you give it credit for.
Of course the downside of tariffs are also well-known. Retaliation tariffs that damage your own industry. Increased costs being passed own downstream in the economy resulting in less value creation. The overall deadweight loss of not utilizing comparative advantage.
It still might be worth it, but you don't get that "force" for free.
Which one's aren't falling? That's a shorter list.
Which really doesn't seem like much for the company that makes the most expensive part of gadgets nearly everyone has.
I doubt more than 30% owns their advanced hardware e.g hardware created after 2017
Between 1.4 and 1.5 billion cell phones were sold in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 (projected), representing roughly another 6 billion cell phones. That is, there is roughly one cell phone per person in the world "created after 2017."
Obviously, a significant number of people bought more than one cell phone in that time period; but, offsetting that, the average cellphone is sold more than once due to the used market. While it's hard to project this to actual estimate saturation of cell phones "created after 2017", it's very hard to imagine a case that the 6 billion phones from 2019 on don't represent at least another 10% of the population.
There is also advanced hardware besides cell phones.
Less than 30% of the world population owning hardware created after 2017 doesn't pass the sniff test.
That said, MediaTek is not the greatest example here -- they're fabless, and most of what they design is fabbed by, you guessed it, TSMC. The better counter-example would be Samsung, who fabs at least some of their own chips.
No, I meant TSMC's advanced tech
I think that's where your assumption might be flawed. It's the most expensive part for PREMIUM offerings on the market that command high price points (e.g. iPhone, AMD Server chips, etc).
The everyday person, globally, can't afford such luxury items.
"Amounts in New Taiwan dollars have been translated into U.S. dollars at the weighted average rate of NTD 30.316 for the third quarter of 2022"
https://investor.tsmc.com/english/encrypt/files/encrypt_file...
this is what happens when you can convince your top customer to pay you 2.4x to gain that <20% performance boost.
https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/229139/a16-bionic...
They only directly compare (240% vs. 20%) if their initial values are the same.
clearly not the case for iphone 14. people are not buying new iphone just because it is 20% faster than iphone 13.
The iphone 14 does not cost 2.4x more because one component is 2.4x more expensive. What is it now? Idk.
A lot has changed since the iphone 13 besides the chip, but it looks like the launch price is $200 more for the 128GB model for the 14 vs. the 13 (~25%). What's the total sales look like? What would the estimated total sales be without it?
Not really interested in going further into this.
The customer can sustainably afford to pay in proportion to the value it delivers to them, not TSMC.
Apple has a finely tuned machine for turning performance into profits, and so can afford to pay more than others... and still have it make sense for Apple.
If TSMC instead had a collection of automotive OEMs as their top-tier customers, this math wouldn't work.
The point being... be in a business where your profit margins are a rounding error in comparison to your customers' bill of materials, and you won't ever go hungry.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-pro...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semicon...
And the whole point of this Topic on HN was about TSMC Q3, which, should Apple really did paid 2.4x more for their roughly 70M of iPhone Pro A16, would have show up on TSMC quarterly results or future guidance.
So NO. N4 does not cost 2.4x of N5.