As TSMC reported results for April and May, Taiwan media estimated its revenue for the second quarter of this year to be as high as $18.2 billion. Intel's estimated revenue for the quarter was $18 billion, which means TSMC is likely to overtake Intel to become the world's second-largest semiconductor company, led by Samsung.
Intel was the world's largest semiconductor company for more than two decades, but in recent years it has been overtaken at times by Samsung in a fierce battle for the top spot. Samsung's semiconductor revenue has surged as memory chip prices have soared in recent years.
Intel's semiconductor business revenue growth significantly declined, is facing both AMD and ARM sandwiched results. AMD's Zen architecture has seen significant performance gains since it was launched in 2016, while TSMC's advanced technology has helped ADM catch up with Intel until last year with Intel's 12-generation Core.
After ARM gained a monopoly position in the mobile processor market, chip enterprises in ARM camp tried to penetrate into the PC processor and server chip market where Intel was located, but most of them failed in the early stage until Apple launched M series processor and Huawei's Kunpeng 920 chip.
Apple's M1 processor is close to the 11-generation Core I7 at that time, which is the first time that ARM group approaches Intel processor in terms of performance, breaking the shackles of low power and low performance of ARM processor, and the POWER consumption of M series processor is still only half of Intel after greatly improving performance. Huawei's Kunpeng 920 won orders for server chips from China Telecom and China Mobile, followed by Alibaba's Pingtou, which launched the Arm-based server chip, the Yitian 710.
AMD and ARM occupy a large market share of Intel in THE PC processor and server chip market, which puts Intel under pressure. Intel will continue to face pressure to lower the price of PC processors, and it will be difficult for Intel to raise the price of server chips, or even lower the price, which naturally leads to a decline in Intel's revenue growth.
After Samsung, TSMC is the second company to challenge Intel's lead in the semiconductor market. TSMC is a pure contract manufacturer. It does not directly launch chips, but attracts orders from global chip companies with its continuously leading advanced technology.
But TSMC has become a major threat to Intel as it has helped AMD challenge Intel in server chips and PC processors and catch up with Apple's M-series processors. Until now, in order to prevent AMD from further catching up with Intel with the help of TSMC's 3nm process, Intel has booked all the 3nm process capacity of TSMC with Apple.
Rely on leading advanced technology, TSMC gained more and more strong bargaining power, has three times since 2020 Q4 price increase, promote its revenue record record every month, almost forty percent net profit margin also breaks, the net profit margin is very rare in the global market, juicy apple net profit margin is only twenty percent.
TSMC's revenues have also risen after a frenzy of price increases; By contrast, Intel's current ship is a bit leaky, and TSMC's revenue is expected to catch up with Intel.
If TSMC's revenues also surpass Intel's, Intel will fall to third place in the global semiconductor market, which would be a huge blow. Intel in the advanced process from 14nm has been just to investors pie, advanced process mass production time has been delayed, its 7nm process can be mass production as scheduled is still questionable, in the revenue has been Samsung and TSMC catch up, it can be said that the house missed to meet overnight rain.
Intel is a microcosm of the chip industry, this more than a decade the competitiveness of the chips in the declining in the United States, occupy market share are also shrinking, the United States in 2021 chip, chip all over the world market share has been below fifty percent, American manufacturing is highly dependent on Asia's chip foundry enterprise, this has let the chip industry worries.