Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE:TSM) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript January 18, 2024 1:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Jeff Su - Director, Investor Relations

Wendell Huang - Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

C. C. Wei - Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Mark Liu - Chairman

Conference Call Participants

Charlie Chan - Morgan Stanley

Bruce Lu - Goldman Sachs

Gokul Hariharan - JP Morgan

Randy Abrams - UBS

Laura Chen - Citi

Brad Lin - Bank of America

Krish Sankar - TD Cowen

Nicholas Barrett - Macquarie

Jeff Su

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to TSMC's Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference and Conference Call. It's great to see everyone in person once again. This is Jeff Su, TSMC's Director of Investor Relations and your host for today. Today's event is being webcast live through TSMC's website at www.tsmc.com, or you can also download the earnings release materials. [Operator Instructions]. The format for today's event will be as follows.

First, TSMC's Vice President and CFO, Mr. Wendell Huang, we'll summarize our operations in the fourth quarter 2023 and full year of 2023, followed by our guidance for the first quarter 2024. Afterwards, Mr. Huang, TSMC's CEO, Dr. C. C. Wei, and TSMC's Chairman, Dr. Mark Lu, will jointly provide the company's key messages. Then TSMC's Chairman, Dr. Mark Lu, will host the Q&A session, where all three of our executives will take your questions.

As usual, I'd like to remind everybody that today's discussions may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to significant risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Please refer to the Safe Harbor notice that appears on our press release.

And now I would like to turn the microphone over to TSMC's CFO, Mr. Wendell Huang for the summary of operations and the current quarter guidance.

Wendell Huang

Thank you, Jeff. Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My presentation were start with financial highlights for the fourth quarter and a recap of full year 2023. After that, I will provide the guidance for the first quarter 2024. Fourth quarter revenue increased 14.4% sequentially in NT dollar or 13.6% in U.S. dollars. as our fourth quarter business was supported by the continued strong ramp of our industry leading 3-nanometer technology. Gross margin decreased 1.3 percentage points sequentially to 53%, primarily due to margin dilution from 3-nanometer ramp.