TAIWAN FIRST TO MARKET

Research evidence excerpt

TAIWAN FIRST TO MARKET

Asia Pacific Equity Research

Taiwan First to Market 03 August 2026

Top Stories

Greater China (Feng Zhu)

• China: July Politburo places near-term focus on fiscal execution

• Broad-based weakness in NBS manufacturing PMI

• Hong Kong SAR: 2Q GDP remained solid; revise up 2H GDP growth forecast

• Taiwan: Strong 2Q GDP, with domestic demand stepping up; CBC minutes centered on CPI debates

• Next week: RatingDog PMI, trade, FX reserve; Hong Kong sales and PMI; Taiwan PMI, CPI and trade

Taiwan: Strong 2Q GDP as domestic demand stepped up (Tingting Ge)

2Q GDP beat again, rising 9.9%q/q saar, the 13th quarter of expansion.

Net exports were still strong, but less dominant.

| GUC (Gokul Hariharan) (3443 TT, OW)

Stronger Google CPU ramp, and upside optionality in Google ASICs; Upgrade to OW

We are upgrading GUC to OW with a Jun-27 PT of NT$5500 (34x 12m forward PE), to reflect the stronger ramp in Google CPU

revenues (up 4x from 2026-28), and reflecting the potential optionality of some Google ASIC Turnkey 3 (TK3) revenues from

2029-30 timeframe. We raise our FY26-28 EPS estimates by 20%/24%/14%, mainly to reflect stronger CPU momentum, while

being a bit more guarded on Tesla AI5 ramp, given recent commentary from Elon Musk that AI5 may not be adopted in cars,

but go straight to robotics. GUC is probably the best pure-play on AI CPU ramp, given its 60+% revenue exposure to Google

Axion CPUs, with revenues likely ramping meaningfully into 2027 and 2028. In addition, Google’s systematic embrace of a

Customer-Owned Tooling (CoT) model for its AI ASICs, is creating more opportunities for design service vendors such as GUC

and Alchip, likely in the TPU v10 family. Key catalysts for the stock are: (1) an increase in 3nm allocation at TSMC for Google