Monday, June 27, 2011
The production costs of Taiwan’s chipmakers are likely to trend upward as Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd. and SUMCO Corp. have recently decided to hike prices in the third quarter of their raw wafer materials, which are integral to chip making.
The two Japanese materials suppliers have firmly insisted on hiking pricing to reflect steep cost surge. They are said to raise prices of 200mm and 300mm raw wafers by at least 10%.
The price hike consideration comes at a time when Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) are seeing customers becoming cautious about placing contracts and Taiwan’s DRAM chipmakers are saddled by price collapse.
Industry executives fear that the price hikes, once realized, will dull the effect of the normally strong third quarter for Taiwan’s semiconductor industry.
Shin-Etsu’s Taiwan dealer, Topco Technologies Inc., said although Shin-Etsu decided to hike prices of raw wafer materials, the size of the hike will remain unknown until the end of this month.
Informed sources said that Shin-Etsu’s and SUMCO’s price-hike decisions are mainly associated with increased electricity rates as a result of closures of several nuclear power plants following the March 11 Sendai earthquake and tsunami, which hit hard Shin-Etsu’s and SUMCO’s factories.
Both suppliers have commanded considerable shares of world market for the materials, with their customers including TSMC, UMC, Nanya Technology Corp., Inotera Memories Inc., PowerChip Semiconductor Corp., Macronix International Co., Ltd., ProMOS Technologies Corp., and Rexchip Electronics Corp.
By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved
|
