SMIC on LFoundry Plans

SMIC quarterly earnings call does not give many details on LFoundry acquisition and plans. Just few small statements from the call:

"Since the acquisition of LFoundry, we have officially entered into the auto IC market. LFoundry manufacturers above 25% of world's auto CIS.

So they would contribute two months of revenue to us in Q3, which is roughly about $20 million to $30 million. In terms of the profit contributions, because right now actually they are running at not high utilization right now, so we expect the contribution to our profit is quite minimal.

There will be a limited amount of our CapEx in LFoundry to bring technology that is aligned to SMIC. So there are a few missing tools in LFoundry that we need to procure to ensure the technology alignment. But the total CapEx for the next year will be fairly limited. We'll be trying to leverage the present unused capacity in the most efficient way.

Let me just also comment a little bit more on LFoundry. Right now we actually have identified some technology and products that we're going to transfer to LFoundry, that hopefully would help to bring up the utilization in the next three to four quarters. At the same time, we are also leveraging the strength of LFoundry in the auto and CIS area, to re-cross-sell the technologies to our own customer set in China. So we believe actually this acquisition will be -- would create good value for us."