James Gard: Each week we look at one stock that is cheap or expensive and why. This week is the turn of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.
TSMC is the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, making 13 million units a year for the likes of Apple and NVIDIA. It's not only Taiwan's biggest company, it's now the largest stock in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, bigger even than China's Alibaba and Tencent. South Korea's Samsung is the only company to match TSMC in terms of semiconductor production.
The global shortage in semiconductors is affecting everything from electric vehicles to smartphones, and there is no obvious end in sight. This is great news for the likes of TSMC whose shares have risen 50% in a year. But Morningstar analysts still think the shares are undervalued. The Taiwanese company also has a wide economic moat because it could command higher prices and has a lower cost base than rivals.
For Morningstar, I'm James Gard.