The Economic Daily News cited information from a semiconductor equipment manufacturer which pointed out that Samsung’s semiconductor operations have been affected by a slowdown in sales of Samsung cell phones.

In addition, as a result of Apple’s decision to rely on TSMC as the OEM for their A10 processor orders, Samsung’s semiconductor division has decided to temporarily suspend the pace of their logic wafer plant expansion and put an emergency halt to the original phase of their semiconductor device equipment orders.

The report pointed out that although Samsung has currently not yet announced their semiconductor-related capital spending for this year, it will be less than their specified investment strategy. Seeing as how TSMC has recently accelerated their 16nm capacity provisioning while Samsung has slowed down the pace of their logic chip plant expansion, it is almost certain that TSMC has achieved a landslide victory in the 16nm battle.

Furthermore, the majority of analysts are also optimistic about TSMC’s development in 2016. With the continual expansion of orders from Apple, TSMC will expand their capital spending primarily in order to speed up their 16nm and 10nm production capacity.

(TR/ Phil Sweeney)