Looking back at the fourth quarter of last year, driver IC manufacturers benefited from urgent orders from panel makers, and their revenues were mostly better than expected. However, due to the pressure on inventories of various companies, they also adopted more aggressive strategies on prices, which affected the fourth quarter gross revenue of related companies. Interest rate performance, estimated by legal persons, including Novatek (3034-TW), Ruiding (3592-TW), Sitronics (8016-TW) and other single-quarter gross margins may face a 40% defense battle.
Breaking down each application, the industry believes that because the TV demand started to be corrected first, and the large-size driver IC also started to recover first, the current inventory has been corrected to a relatively healthy level, and the price pressure has obviously eased. Even if there are urgent orders, the visibility is low, resulting in continuous price corrections.
As for mobile phone driver ICs, although the market began to adopt OLED panels in large numbers, which pushed up the demand for OLED driver ICs, the demand for TDDI continued to slump, and the overall price of small-size driver ICs also declined; under the pressure of IT and small-size panel prices, driver IC The industry is also difficult to survive alone, and can only maintain business expansion by exchanging price for volume.
Novatek’s gross profit margin for the fourth quarter is estimated to be 38.5-40.5%, legal person estimates, due to November and DecemberNew Taiwan dollarThe appreciation rate is large, and the price of driver ICs continues to decrease. Novatek’s actual gross profit margin may fall at the lower end of the financial forecast, about 39%, which is the first time in two years that the level below the 4-digit prefix has been seen.
However, the industry is optimistic. With the continuous reduction of wafer costs in the first half of this year, and the return of OLED driver ICs and large-size driver ICs to healthy inventory levels, the price downward space is limited. The gross profit margin performance of each company still has certain support and is excellent. Before the outbreak of the epidemic, the level was below 30%.