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Apple is TSMC's #1 customer and they account for 25% of their revenue
- KptMarchewa 5y agoI thought AMD is bigger than 5%.
- xony 5y agofake news
- tooltalk 5y agoduh~
- 1cvmask 5y agoI am surprised to see MediaTek as the second largest customer.
- ksec 5y agoMediatek make up to 25% of Mobile Phone / Tablet SoC. ( May be 30% by now ) Along with TV, STB, WiFi etc.
- brodouevencode 5y agoAnd yet AAPLs market valuation has taken off while TSMC has been flat at best.
- PeterisP 5y agoThey extract quite different margins from their products; the big markup (and thus profit, and thus the justification for market valuation) happens not when a chip is manufactured but when it's put in an iPhone. The iPhone's processor manufactured by TSMC contributes only about $40 to the cost of the phone (https://www.phonearena.com/news/iphone-12-bill-of-materials-revealed_id128600 https://www.phonearena.com/news/iphone-12-bill-of-materials-...). The Macbook's M1 key advantage to Apple seems to be that it's cheaper than the previously used Intel processors (https://www.techspot.com/news/87663-apple-possibly-saving-billions-moving-macs-apple-silicon.html https://www.techspot.com/news/87663-apple-possibly-saving-bi...), so again, it's a major boost to the profitability (and value) of Apple, and just a minor one to TSMC who gets paid a reasonable but effectively commodity price for their manufacturing.
- brodouevencode 5y agoCompletely good points. Thank you.
- nowherebeen 5y agoI wonder if TSMC can raise prices since Apple doesn't have a lot of other options at the 3nm level.
- ksec 5y agoIt is hard. But I hope they do. They need to paid their engineers better to compete. Their expansion to US are already costly. ( US engineers working in TSMC are already complaining about working conditions and salaries. I am not surprised. ) Apple doesn't always have to use 3nm, they could have stick with 4nm for another year and let other parties to pay the bill. But what if other parties are not interested at those cost. TSMC will be back to square one. So in reality it kinds of goes both ways.
- PeterisP 5y agoI believe that the prices (and both the availability of capacity and the requirement to use it/pay for it) for Apple were locked in even before TSMC had the current 3nm process, as a certain source of revenue removing much of the business risk of building the fabs.
- znpy 5y agoI wonder what would happen if TSMC arbitrarily revoked Apple's order due to alleged "breach of terms and conditions" and witheld IP.
- colejohnson66 5y agoThat would be corporate suicide. Ignoring the inevitable lawsuit (from Apple) that would result, the loss of 25% of your revenue is a sure fire way to destroy a company. Then there'd be lawsuits from your investors over that, and it becomes a whole mess. Not to be cynical, but it's also why big YouTubers have their own support person they can email with issues, while the little ones don't. It's not necessarily because YouTube (as a company) cares about them, but because the loss of ad revenue from those million+ subscriber channels would be a bad idea. People there definitely care about those YouTubers, but ultimately, YouTube as a company is dependent on those channels existing. Without them, watch times are lower, which leads to less advertising revenue, which leads to less motivated YouTubers, and so on.