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R&D and Capex are the tickets to participation in the market and need to be paid upfront. Value is the outcome of a successful investment in R&D and Capex. You need to pay for R&D for typically many years to be allowed to participate but R&D has little impact on today's business. For Capex...
Front-end manufacturing is the 2nd most attractive area, with 24% value added. Look at what is happening with Nvidia and TSMC here: Is TSMC not invited to the AI party?
The US is already in the lead in design, so investing in the 2nd most attractive area makes sense economically, although the...
The semiconductor supply chain is also a value chain. Each part of the chain adds value to the end product - the finished component sold to an electronics or similar company. The chart shows each link's share of total R&D and of Total Capex. The Value add is the link's share of the total profit...
Higher-cost wafers will create a higher inventory than lower-cost wafers. I think that TSMC controls their material input better (better deals and JIT) and their output better. Right now, they probably also benefit from Nvidia GPU's not collecting much dust in the warehouse.
Thanks Daniel
The inventory chart is the financial inventory value. It includes raw materials, work in progress and finished goods. For me, there are two takeaways: TSMC is better at managing inventory than other foundries and that the TSMC Q4-23 inventory was down - this is a good signal for...
The Y axis is $BUSD - I should have made it clear in the headline - that chart is not fully developed yet, but thought it would be good to get out before TSMC reported for reference.
