TSMC reported its Q4 2020 revenue earlier today, with positive growth across the board. The company’s yearly revenue was up by 25% in 2020, with a gross and operating margin of 53% and 42%, respectively. That’s an increase of over 7 points compared to 2019.
Overall, most of the growth figures stayed in the low 30% for the last fiscal year, with an ROE of 29.6% and CMS of 791.48, an increase of 35.7% YoY
In the last quarter of 2020, the 5nm EUV process which is presently being exclusively being supplied to Apple, accounted for 1/5th or 20% of the company’s overall quarterly revenue. The 7nm node, on the other hand, brought in 29% despite being responsible for the majority of the company’s orders.
Comparing the last two years, you can see that TSMC is rapidly ramping up 5nm production which went from 0 to 8% over the last year while 7nm volume grew by 27 to 33%. All the older nodes saw a drop in production capacity as demand for the newer processes increased.
Interestingly, Q4 saw negative growth in the HPC and IoT sectors while Automotive and DCE grew by 27% and 29%, respectively. The smartphone market which is responsible for half of the foundry’s overall revenue also grew by 13%.
The yearly figures are quite opposite, with HPC and IoT growing by 39% and 28%, respectively. Most of this growth can be attributed to AMD’s Epyc CPUs, NVIDIA’s V100/A100 and some of Xilinx’s Data Center accelerators. Smartphone grew by a moserate 23% while automotive fell by 7% compared to the last year.