By Vincent Fernando, CFA, Zero One
- TSMC: +16.6% Premium; Returning to the 15 – 20% Trading Range?
- UMC: +0.5% Premium; Near the Middle of the Historical Trading Range
- ASE: +5.2% Premium; Participating in Two Investor Conferences in Next Two Weeks
By Douglas O’Laughlin, Fabricated Knowledge
- It’s an exciting time when your favorite semiconductor CEO comes out of “retirement” to return as a CEO.
- Mine is personally Ford Tamer, who drove Inphi to ship the best DSP in the market against much larger competitors at a much faster pace.
- In my opinion, Inphi was almost a miracle story in semiconductors. It was a literal David versus Goliath, and the man who led the team was Ford.
By William Keating, Ingenuity
- US DoD & AWS deals are little more than distractions from the main event
- Making Intel Foundry a subsidiary won’t make one whit of a difference but may just be the next step in its eventual spin-off
- The core issue, the GM collapse in Q224, was not addressed in the BM update from the CEO. That’s a problem.
By Vincent Fernando, CFA, Zero One
- TSMC’s U.S. Production Strategy Achieves Major Milestone – Begins Production of Apple A16 Chips in Arizona
- Reports of Apple’s Disappointing Initial iPhone 16 Sales Data; Key Taiwan Suppliers Top Losers Recently
- Samsung Falling Behind TSMC – New Report of Low Yields Continuing to Plague Samsung’s 3nm AI Processors
By Vincent Fernando, CFA, Zero One
- Explosive pagers linked to Hezbollah attacks spark controversy for a Taiwanese brand.
- Not just Lebanon – today it was reported that the South Korean military removed Chinese-made CCTV cameras after secret backdoors were detected.
- A counter-intuitive conclusion: Despite recent news, is the trend ultimately positive for Taiwanese tech hardware makers?
By Vincent Fernando, CFA, Zero One
- Microsoft today announced a major Copilot update, called “Wave 2”, introducing a new collaborative interface and enhanced Copilot capabilities across all major Office apps.
- Copilot continues to gain momentum with large corporations, as Microsoft announced today that Vodafone has adopted it for 68,000 employees.
- We remain Structurally Long PC Makers – We continue to believe Microsoft’s Copilot will drive PC upgrades as users recognize the productivity benefits of faster ‘AI PCs’.
By Jim Handy, Objective Analysis
- The semiconductor market is currently enjoying an AI-driven demand surge
- The past two demand-driven surges have turned into collapses as growth returned to the long-term trend
- When we compare the past two cycles to the current one, it appears that a collapse could occur relatively soon
By Douglas O’Laughlin, Fabricated Knowledge
- Strawberry was a breakthrough. Some people ask, “What’s the big deal?” but feasibly, there is a new scaling law working in tandem with training, and that’s the Chain of Thought / Inference.
- The chart below is a bit confusing, but the conclusion is the longer the model “thinks,” the better the answer.
- The new model has another log-linear scaling law. It pretty much computes, and the Bitter Lesson wins again.
By William Keating, Ingenuity
- Global semiconductor sales for the month of July 2024 amounted to $51.3 billion, representing an increase of 18.7% increase YoY and a 2.7% increase MoM
- The July revenue number was the second highest monthly semiconductor revenue ever recorded, the highest being $51.7 billion in May 2022
- Increasing memory prices along with modest recoveries in both PC and Smartphone unit shipments will continue to drive semi sales higher through EOY 2024.
By Scott Foster, LightStream Research
- Kokusai has dropped 44% from its July peak, offering a long-term opportunity at reasonably attractive valuations. Management’s guidance looks conservative.
- KKR has reduced its stake from 43.4% to 23.2%, increasing the float while indicating that it still sees a long-term opportunity. Applied Materials has bought 14.7% of the company.
- The completion of a new factory in Japan should double production capacity to meet demand from makers of AI processors, high-bandwidth memory, 3D NAND and power devices.
