United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE:UMC) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Gokul Hariharan : I just had one question. So, given, Chi-Tung you mentioned, the CapEx will probably peak out this year. How should we think about depreciation going forward? I think you have this 20% bump in depreciation this year. Should we expect depreciation to continue to keep growing at this kind of pace into the next couple of years as well? Or is it kind of largely kind of — this is like the big jump in deposition that we’re going to see in 2024?

Chi-Tung Liu : Yes, we see a little bit delay impact from the peak of CapEx to depreciation. We will probably see a peak of depreciation in year 2026, two years after that, two years after 2024.

Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we are running out time, so we are taking the last one. The last question, Laura Chen from Citi. Go ahead, please.

Laura Chen: Hi, thank you for taking my question. Just to follow up on the Intel’s cooperation as well. I’m just wondering that based on your agreement with Intel, is there any like license fee or IP transaction of the cooperation?

Jason Wang: No, there’s not.

Laura Chen: Okay. And also, I know there’s a lot of different kind of time and demands could adapt the 12 nanometers, but just wondering, do you have any priorities or like your first generation of the FinTech ramp, your scheduling will put into your first consideration right now?

Jason Wang: Well, I mean, they are least the customer that we are engaging with. We will first finalize our discussion with the customer, and then try to align with our development milestone and then hopefully we can confirm the engagement. We are very early stage of this joint development. And while we just announced it, we already have a customer discussion, but we have not finalized it yet.

Laura Chen: Okay. Thank you very much, and Happy New Year.

Jason Wang: Thank you. Happy New Year to you too.

Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for all your questions. That concludes today’s Q&A session, and I’ll turn things over to UMC, Head of IR for closing remarks.

Michael Lin: Thank you for attending this conference today. We appreciate your questions. As always, if you have any additional follow up questions, please feel free to contact UMC at irumc.com. Have a good day.

Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our conference for 4Q ‘23. Thank you for your participation in UMCs conference. There will be a webcast replay within two hours. Please visit www.umc.com under the investors event section. You may now disconnect. Thank you and goodbye.