Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing ADR Earnings Call Nuggets: LED and Solar Strategies and CapEx Spending

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing ADR (NYSE:TSM) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

LED and Solar Strategies

Michael Chou – Deutsche Bank: Could you give some date for your LED and solar business?

Dr. Morris Chang – Chairman and CEO: LED – on both LED and solar, our strategy is first to achieve a technological distinction, either better performance than current competitors or better cost than current competitors. Anyway, a technological distinction before we start large-scale production, before we put a lot of capital money into et cetera. That’s the philosophy. That is the strategy, philosophy for both solar and LED. At this point, I think we are perhaps a little further ahead in LED than in solar. I think the environment is a bit more friendly to the LED also. So in LED, we are forging our way ahead, and in fact, in the fourth quarter, last quarter we already had some commercial revenue. By commercial revenue I mean more than samples, but really real product for real money. So we already had some revenue and we expect the revenue to increase, put it dramatically this year. I don’t know whether it’s going to be (pretty) forward or not, but it will increase pretty dramatically this year. Now, on solar — as I said the environment is not as friendly because the world has at least silicon solar capacity glut and major countries putting up incentives for more production and however, we think that our thin-film, our CIGE technology is pretty promising one, and we are spending a lot of our R&D money to try to achieve a distinction with the CIGE technology, but we are not in the a commercial production, commercial revenue stage yet.

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Michael Chou – Deutsche Bank: Follow-up question is, would your LED be based on silicon substrate or traditional software substrate?

Dr. Morris Chang – Chairman and CEO: I guess, I think we said that earlier.