SMIC Q3 gross margin rises to 29.9% on urgent customer pull-ins

Cointime reports: SMIC’s third-quarter gross margin reached 29.9%, up 4.6 percentage points quarter-on-quarter, co-CEO Zhao Haijun said at the company’s Q3 earnings call. He attributed the gain to urgent customer pull-in requests that led SMIC to slow engineering and R&D wafer starts to support shipments, lifting capacity utilization to 97.3%, up 3.6 points, on 20,000 wafers of new monthly capacity in 8-inch equivalent. Higher output diluted per-wafer costs, offsetting a 2.3-point negative impact from rising depreciation and pushing margin above the guidance ceiling.