Live news updates: Japan and Korea manufacturing growth slumps in signs of regional worries

NXP Semiconductors warned of uncertainties in the macro environment ahead, despite strong growth in its automotive division that helped it report revenue and profits in line with market estimates.

The Dutch company reported 20.4 per cent year-on-year growth in revenues to $3.45bn, in line with analyst estimates. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation increased more than 30 per cent from the same period last year, to $1.4bn.

“Overall in the third quarter, we performed very well; however, we were impacted by the weakening macro-environment in our consumer-exposed [internet of things] business,” chief executive Kurt Sievers said.

Sievers said NXP expects the supply chain constraints to continue and that the company is “cautious in the intermediate term, due to the uncertainties in the macro environment.”

NXP Semiconductors, which was spun out from Philips in 2006 and went public in 2010, makes chips principally for the automotive, industrial and IoT sectors. None of these fall into the category of advanced chip production technologies for which the US has introduced export controls to China.

So far, automotive and industrial-focused chip companies have announced results indicating they are relatively sheltered from the new export controls implemented by the US this month. Meanwhile, European chip equipment manufacturers have emerged as more vulnerable.

However, the Chinese market is NXP’s largest contributor to revenue, accounting for nearly 38 per cent of its total sales of $11.06 billion in 2021. It owns a back-end chip manufacturing facility in the Chinese city of Tianjin for mature chips such as microcontrollers, analogues and mixed-signal chips.