TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) remained the largest contract chipmaker globally in the second quarter with a 53.4% share of the pure-play foundry sector.

Taiwanese market research firm TrendForce released a report last week showing that TSMC was still the top-ranked foundry by income in the second quarter, with revenue of US$18.15 billion (NT$579 billion), although the quarterly growth rate shrank to 3.5% in response to wafer price increases pushing up the Q1 revenue base period, TrendForce said.

TSMC was able to capitalize on strong demand in Q2 for HPC, IoT, and automotive inventory stocking actions. TSMC saw revenue for its 5/4nm node increase by around 11.1% from Q1 due to Nvidia, AMD, Bitmain, and other HPC customers releasing new products using the company’s advanced nodes, the report noted.

The Taiwanese chipmaker saw revenue for its 7/6nm node increase by 2.8% quarter-on-quarter, due to mainstream products from its HPC clients.

Other Taiwanese foundries in TrendForce’s top ten were UMC at the third spot with US$2.45 billion in Q2 revenue, followed by PSMC at number seven with US$656 million, and VIS at the eighth spot with US$520 million.

Overall, TrendForce found that stable demand for automotive and industrial equipment drove overall growth for foundry output value during the second quarter. Also, an addition of a marginal amount of new capacity during Q2 allowed for increased wafer shipments, while price hikes also helped the top ten foundries reach combined revenue of US$33.20 billion for the quarter, per the report.