Samsung will also increase its price for chip production
Previously, there were reports that TSMC plans to increase prices significantly from 2022, and plans to increase the production price of 7nm or more advanced wafers by 10%, and the production price of 16nm or above wafers by 20%. Investment institutions expect TSMC’s revenue to increase by at least 22%, while gross profit margin may increase to about 55%. At present, a considerable part of CPU and GPU is dependent on TSMC’s production capacity, which means that consumers may have to spend more money.
According to The Elec report, Samsung and another South Korean foundry, Key Foundry, are also planning to increase the price of chip production, which is expected to increase between 15% and 20%. The reason is the increase in transportation and packaging costs. The specific increase is related to the process required by the customer’s order, the order volume, and the contract period. Since chip packaging companies started to increase prices this month, it may affect customers who have placed orders with Samsung.
The successive price increases of foundries will undoubtedly put pressure on chip design companies that do not have production equipment. After all, they cannot reduce orders because of the increase in chip production quotations. As the current production capacity is very scarce, even if the price rises, it is necessary to fight for production capacity. The state of the supply chain at this stage is not good. There is a large gap between chip supply and demand. The foundry must maintain revenue to expand production capacity and maintain production.
At present, Nvidia’s GPU and Qualcomm’s chips are quite dependent on Samsung’s production capacity, and perhaps related terminal products will soon face price increases.