Solid Month, Solid Quarter

Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM), foundry to the elite of the elite when it comes to Big Tech, will not be releasing the firm's third quarter financial results until October 17th. However, much like Costco (COST) does in the retailing world, Taiwan Semi does in the tech world. They let us know how they are doing on a monthly basis. Taiwan Semi produces high-end chips for some of tech's brightest stars... namely Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) among others on the design / generative AI side and Apple (AAPL) on the consumer electronics side. Taiwan Semi also competes directly against Intel's (INTC) still sort of new, but so far less successful, upstart foundry business.

For the month of September, Taiwan Semi generated revenue of NT$759.69B, decisively beating expectations for something close to NT$748B according to Bloomberg News. Note to readers, the home currency for Taiwan Semi is the New Taiwan dollar. Currently one US dollar buys about 32.24 New Taiwan dollars. Adding that number to the monthly results for July and August gets third quarter revenue to NT$251.87B, which would be good for year over year growth of 39%. This also works out to about $23.6B in US dollars. Back in July, when Taiwan Semi reported the firm's second quarter results, the firm issued Q3 guidance of $22.4B to $23.2B, so this would be a fairly substantial beat of the firm's own outlook. The consensus across Wall Street has been for roughly $23B, so still... a very nice beat.

Readers may recall that a month or so ago, analysts at JP Morgan (JPM) suggested that the numbers they were seeing implied a third quarter beat. Taiwan Semi themselves had said that the firm that if business was good for the third quarter, it would be reflective of increased demand for smartphones and AI-infrastructure building.

I am Long NVDA, AMD, and INTC.