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On the evening of March 27, SMIC (688981. SH) announced its full-year results for fiscal year 2024. During the period, sales revenue was 57.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 27.7%, a record high; The gross profit margin was 18.6% and the capacity utilization rate was 85.6%. net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 3.7 billion yuan, down 23.3% year-on-year. Earnings per share were $0.46.

According to the announcement, SMIC's main business income for the whole year was 57.1 billion yuan, an increase of 28.1% year-on-year. Among them, the revenue of wafer foundry business was 53.2 billion yuan, an increase of 30.3% year-on-year.

SMIC's management said that in 2024, the global semiconductor industry as a whole will show signs of recovery, and the trend of industrial chain recovery will be basically established. Due to the wide range of applications involved in the semiconductor industry, there is a certain differentiation in the development of various market segments in the same period. Among them, in the world's leading industries, the pursuit of excellence in intelligent and high-speed computing performance continues to promote the rapid growth of leading enterprises in related application fields, guiding related industries to show explosive growth, which has become the main driving force for the increase in the overall semiconductor market scale. Benefiting from the new round of functional upgrades and performance improvements of smart terminal products, the market has moderately catalyzed the replacement of smartphones, personal computers, wearable devices, consumer electronics and other products, and the terminal demand has shown a slow growth trend. In the field of automotive electronics, with the increasingly fierce competition in the electric vehicle market, the inventory digestion of automotive chips has gradually slowed down, and the demand for semiconductors in this field has entered a stage of cyclical adjustment.

According to the annual report, the revenue of integrated circuit wafer foundry is divided by application classification: the smartphone business accounted for 27.8%, compared with 26.7% in the same period last year, an increase of more than one percentage point; computers and tablets accounted for 16.6%, compared with 26.7% in the same period last year, a decrease of nearly 10 percentage points; Consumer electronics accounted for 37.8%, up 12.8 percentage points from 25% in the same period last year, connected and wearable accounted for 10%, up 12.1% from the same period last year, and industrial and automotive accounted for 7.8%, up from 9.5% in the same period last year.

In terms of wafer size, 8-inch revenue accounted for 22.7%, compared with 26.3% in the same period last year; 12-inch revenue accounted for 77.3%, compared with 73.7% in the same period last year.

As for the market forecast for 2025, SMIC said that at the beginning of 2025, based on extensive communication with industry chain partners, it is generally believed that in 2025, in addition to the continued rapid growth of artificial intelligence, the demand for various application fields in the market will be flat or moderately grow. The external environment will bring certain uncertainties to the second half of 2025, and the competition in the industry will also intensify.

Under the premise that there are no significant changes in the external environment, the company's guidance for 2025 is that sales revenue growth is higher than the average of comparable peers, and capital expenditure is the same as the previous year. Previously, SMIC's guidance for the first quarter was that sales revenue increased by 6%-8% quarter-on-quarter, and gross margin was expected to be between 19% and 21%.