Summary
Business
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited, together with its subsidiaries,
manufactures, packages, tests, and sells integrated circuits and other semiconductor
devices in Taiwan, China, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Japan, the United States,
and internationally. It provides a range of wafer fabrication processes, including
processes to manufacture complementary metal- oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) logic,
mixed-signal, radio frequency, embedded memory, bipolar CMOS mixed-signal, and
others. The company also offers customer and engineering support services;
manufactures masks; and invests in technology start-up companies; researches,
designs, develops, manufactures, packages, tests, and sells color filters; and
provides investment services. Its products are used in high performance computing,
smartphones, Internet of things, automotive, and digital consumer electronics.
The company was incorporated in 1987 and is headquartered in Hsinchu City, Taiwan.
Moat & Earnings
Without AI, companies like NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) would have been very little
known in the broader sense. Jensen Huang would have been relatively unknown.
A CEO of a graphics card company that saw some sort of press before AI as the
go-to for bitcoin mining. Before AI and bitcoin mining, the company was known
among the gaming enthusiasts who were building their PC rigs to be able to
run Crysis with somewhat of a decent frame rate. All of that has changed in
just a short couple of years. The company's been working hard on its chips
that fueled the AI revolution, the modern gold rush so to speak, and certainly
many benefited, especially NVDA.
Risks
Firstly, the semiconductor market volatility and frothy valuations do not paint a
good picture. Even if I think TSMC is undervalued compared to many other
semiconductor companies, that doesn't mean its share price is not going to be
affected. NVDA will have to do miracles over the next year or so to justify
its almost $3T market capitalization. That is one tall order in my opinion.
Any meaningful weakness over the next few quarters or the beat wasn't large enough,
will send the company's shares down, just like it did last week. There was a
time when semiconductor stocks were in a negative sentiment. Just one year ago,
no one liked them and TSMC was trading at around 12 P/E ratio. That was a
no-brainer buy in my opinion. Now that its PE ratio about doubled, it is not
as cheap as it was, but I believe the outlook is very positive and the TTM
P/E ratio of 25 is decent.
Secondly, which is more of a long-term risk, the slump in AI is going
to come, there is no doubt about it. The big tech companies will start
to ease up on CapEx spending eventually. Especially if all of that
capital injected into AI does not yield any revenues or improve their
bottom line meaningfully. The big risk here is that all this money spent
will amount to nothing basically. The missing revenue is a real risk.
Lastly, the obligatory geopolitical risks are still there. The most recent
quarterly report showed that the company gets 16% of its sales from China,
which is the highest in a long while. This will deter many investors who are
not fans of such risks and want nothing to do with China. Further restrictions
on China may affect TSMC's top line, but in my opinion, even with such a
percentage coming from China, not all of that revenue will be lost. Especially
with the diversification efforts the company has been achieving, the China risk
should diminish meaningfully over the next couple of years.
There has been a lot of talk lately of a recession hitting very soon. History
may not repeat itself but when the FED pivots, the markets tend to do poorly
for the next year or so. With massive revisions to the employment data flowing
in, the highest we have seen since '09, it is hard to not draw comparisons.
Conclusion
These are the reasons to keep calm in such turbulent times and continue to hold and
buy more on meaningful dips just like we saw recently. The company's roadmap looks
very promising, which solidifies my long-term outlook. I still believe that many
investors do not recognize the company's true potential and how central it is to
many technologies out there, not just AI, which is front and center as of right now.
AI came, and it will probably eventually be replaced by another advanced technology,
if TSMC is to remain the key leader in the industry, it will most likely be selling
the pickaxes for the next modern gold revolution and reap the rewards for decades
to come.
The volatility in the markets will probably present even better opportunities for
entry in the long run, but I will continue to average down until something drastic
changes in the company's operations, but for now, the company remains a strong buy
in my opinion.
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