According to Taiwanese sources, two largest Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturers, UMC and TSMC, reduced the prices for their customers ordering integrated circuits trying to win the competition with one another. The price reduction will touch upon those semiconductor chips produced with different technologies. The prices have been reduced by 5% in general. The administration of UMC and TSMC Companies hope to attract more customers this way after the traditionally slow summer time.

Precisely speaking, we should point out that the price reduction at TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) first of all affected the older manufacturing technologies. They reduced the price for production carried out with 0.5micron technology and 6-inch wafers, 0.35micron and 0.25micron technologies and 8-inch wafers. Generally speaking, this price reduction is nothing extraordinary. Things like that happen at TSMC every year and are connected not with winning more customers but rather with the reduction of the company’s production costs and increase in the chips yields.

UMC (United Microelectronics Corporation), which has been very successful lately in winning the market niche reduced the prices more tangibly than the rival. On average, ordering chips by UMC will turn out about 10% cheaper than before. However, just like in TSMC’s case, the price reduction has to do with the older manufacturing technologies in the first place.

The representatives of both companies, TSMC and UMC, hope their market shares will grow bigger, although at the same time they claim that their price reductions were also aimed at assisting smaller companies entering the semiconductor integrated circuits market, which have every chance to become their constant large customers.

Besides, they also expect their current customers to benefit noticeably from the described above price reduction. A lot of companies, including Mediatek, Sunplus Technology, Realtek Semiconductor, Novatek Microelectronics, VIA Technologies and ALi Corporation claim that the price reduction on these fabs will let them reduce the priced for their chipsets by about 5%.