Chip Maker TSMC Breaks Sales Record on Bitcoin Mining Boost

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has reported strong financial results in the first quarter of 2018, figures driven by a growth in orders for cryptocurrency mining chips.

During its shareholder conference call on Thursday, the world's largest independent semiconductor maker said it generated 248 billion Taiwan new dollars in sales revenue for Q1 - a year-on-year increase of 6.1 percent.

The company saw NT$89 billion in net income, reflecting a 2.5 percent growth year-on-year.

Notably, the revenue in March alone accounted for 41 percent of the Q1 performance - NT$103 billion - making it the largest single monthly sales income for the firm, based on a financial statement filed on April 10.

"These results were mainly driven by strong demand from high performance computing such as cryptocurrency mining," explained C. C. Wei, president and co-chief executive officer of TSMC, though he did not disclose the percentage accounted for by mining chip orders.

"We see very strong demand in the first quarter from cryptocurrencies. During the second quarter, while we do see some weakness in the 28mm chip, the [demand for] the rest of the technology is still very strong on cryptocurrency."

The sales figures follow a similar pattern to that seen last year, when the firm reported revenues of $8.32 billion and $9.2 billion in the third and fourth quarter, respectively - strong figures that the chip maker also attributed to a growing demand for cryptocurrency mining chips.

The news comes soon after Chinese mining hardware giant Bitmain, which CoinDesk confirmed is a client of TSMC, controversially released the Antminer E3, a dedicated ASIC mining machine for ethereum, in early April.

C. C. Wei image via conference call.

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