Financials
• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced a huge 76,4% in second quarter profit, which is its biggest jump in earnings in the last eight financial quarters. This was largely due to the major demand for its chips after a two-year-long global shortage. TSMC’s net profit for April to June rose to a record $7,9 billion, despite record global inflation and analysts warning of a looming recession. Demand for Apple’s iPhone 13 as well as strong sales of high-performance computing chips used in 5G networks and artificial intelligence applications were major contributors.
• Mycronic has announced a second quarter increase in net sales of 20% with EBIT amounting to $241 million over the period. High Flex, High Volume and Global Technologies accounted for most of the increase in sales, whereas Pattern Generators’ net sales declined. For the period from January to June the order intake now stands at 30% with the total net sales equalling only 2%.
• ST has reported its second quarter financial results with net revenues of $3,84 billion, gross margin of 47,4% and a net income of $867 million. Jean-Marc Chery, STMicroelectronics president & CEO, commented, “Q2 net revenues and gross margin came in above the mid-point of our business outlook range driven by continued strong demand for our product portfolio. ST’s third quarter outlook, at the mid-point, is for net revenues of $4,24 billion, increasing year-over-year by 32,6% and sequentially by 10,5%.”
• Silicon Labs has announced second quarter 2022 results which show that revenue has increased to $263 million, an increase of 55% YOY. “We just marked the one-year anniversary of becoming a pure-play IoT company, and we are more confident than ever in our ability to lead and scale in the large and growing IoT wireless market,” said Matt Johnson, president and CEO of Silicon Labs.
• Cosmo Ferrites Limited, manufacturer of a range of soft ferrite cores, announced a 79% increase in net revenue for the quarter ending in June 2022. This net revenue YoY increase was on the back of increased sales of technologically advanced ferrite cores, mainly for the growing electric vehicle market.
• The published WSTS semiconductor market forecast has stated that the worldwide semiconductor market is expected to increase 16,3% in 2022, continuing to grow by 5,1% in 2023. The report stated that following a strong growth year of 26,2% in 2021, WSTS expects another year of double-digit growth for the worldwide semiconductor market in 2022 with a forecast of $646 billion.
• Despite these positive results and WSTS’s forecast, key semiconductor market drivers, PCs and smartphones, both showed a decline in shipments in the first half of 2022, which does not bode well for earnings reports for the full 2022 period. According to IDC, shipments in 2Q 2022 were down 15% from the same period last year. Based on this data a double-digit decline for 2022 has been forecast by some players.
• IC Insights (www.icinsights.com) has reported a downward trend in IC sales. This unprecedented dramatic decline in the June IC market was driven by a steep drop in memory IC sales. Although a revenue downturn is not readily evident in the 2Q22 financial results from Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, Micron is predicting a -17% drop in sales for its fiscal quarter ending in August. It is reasonable to presume that Samsung and Hybix will follow suit. Much of the current IC market weakness is due to economic concerns caused by rising inflation, ongoing supply chain woes, and from suppliers actively working to reduce the IC inventory levels.
• IDTechEx has also reported that 2022 continues to present big challenges for electric vehicle manufacturers. Mention is made of various factors that are currently influencing the downward financial trend being experienced including:
• Factory closures in China, driven by the ongoing pandemic.
• Disrupted production (Shanghai, which sells more electric vehicles than Norway, recorded no car sales in April).
• A shortage of wire harnesses emerged, driven by the war in Ukraine.
• The fact that battery raw material prices increased.
• The ongoing chip shortages.
• OEMs have dramatically increased electric vehicle prices.
Companies
• Google has said that it plans on using chips based on technology from ARM, adding pressure to both Intel and AMD, who until recently had the lion’s share in supplying chips for data centres. Google has said that it will be turning to Ampere Computing, a company founded by former Intel executives, to use its Altera chips to provide computing power. Ampere is already providing chips to both Microsoft and Oracle for use in their respective data centres.
• Intel has started informing customers that due to rising costs it plans to increase prices across its line of products, in some cases by more than 20%. The company first hinted to this in its first quarter earnings call. The move comes amid a world-wide supply chain crisis caused by the global pandemic.
• Renesas has announced that it has completed the acquisition of Reality AI following shareholders’ approval. Reality AI offers a wide range of embedded AI and Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) solutions for advanced non-visual sensing in automotive, industrial and commercial products. Combined with Renesas’ current MCU and MPU product portfolios, the acquisition will allow Renesas to expand its software offerings for AI applications and increase its ability to provide AI solutions that combine both hardware and software.
• Teledyne has announced acquisition of a majority interest in technology company Noiseless Acoustics (NL Acoustics). Together, they will provide a range of condition monitoring and safety solutions including acoustic imaging systems, optical gas leak detection and hazardous gas and flame detection systems.
• Kim Woo-Pyeong, semiconductor expert at Apple, has left after being hired by Samsung as director of Samsung’s recently established Packaging Solution Centre. Samsung started mass producing chips based on 3 nm architecture in June this year. However, as the difficulty of developing ultra-micro fabrication processes increases, chipmakers are looking towards enhancing packaging technology in a bid to circumvent physical limitations. Woo-Pyeong is set to take on this role at Samsung.
• Indium Corporation has earned an excellence award from Allegro MicroSystems for the work of its Asia-Pacific operations in delivering quality, on-time products during the 2021 fiscal year. Vice president of sales, marketing, and technical service Tim Twining said, “At Indium Corporation, we are proud to support our customers around the globe with innovative products and services that help enable world-changing technology.”
Technologies
• A new report from the IoT market research firm Berg Insight says that the global number of cellular IoT subscribers increased by 22% during 2021 to reach 2,1 billion. The major regional markets China, Western Europe and North America grew similarly during the year as the world recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2026, Berg Insight now projects that there will be 4,3 billion IoT devices connected to cellular networks worldwide.
• IDTechEx has forecast that the automotive Lidar market will grow to $8,4 billion by 2033. With the ever-increasing interest in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles, adopting light detection and ranging (Lidar) is an important inclusion to reach vehicle autonomy. Lidar, which appeared shortly after the invention of laser, has been steadily improving the field of 3D mapping and providing vehicles with depth scanning ability. Driven primarily by the impending global increase in EVs, HEVs and vehicle autonomy, the forecast is that the next ten years will see huge growth in the Lidar market.
• SEACOM and British Telecommunications have teamed up to deliver enterprise communication services in Africa. The strategic alliance will help SEACOM further its own infrastructure and deliver new networking, security and communications solutions to enterprise customers in Africa. SEACOM’s customers will benefit from access to BT’s cloud security incident event management platform which provides real-time visibility and monitoring across the organisation’s entire IT environment.
• The 144 Tbps undersea Equiano Internet cable has finally reached South Africa after making land at Melkbosstrand in the Western Cape at a Telkom facility. The cable started its undersea journey in Portugal and extends down the west coast of Africa. With a design capacity of 144 Tbps, this cable has the highest capacity of any Internet cable on the African continent and should help to bring down prices and increase bandwidth for South Africans when it eventually comes online in the next few months.
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