UPDATE 2-TSMC posts flat Q4 revenue but beats expectations

(Adds details from TSMC statement, background on customers, earnings date, and stock price movements, paragraphs 2, 7-10)

TAIPEI, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Taiwan chipmaker TSMC reported a largely flat fourth-quarter revenue on Wednesday, but that still beat both the company's and market's expectations.

The world's largest contract chipmaker, whose customers include Apple and Nvidia, has benefited from a boom in artificial intelligence applications that has helped it weather the tapering off of pandemic-led demand.

Revenue in the final three months of last year came in at T$625.5 billion ($20.10 billion), according to Reuters calculations, compared with $19.93 billion in the year-ago period.

That beat Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co's (TSMC) previous prediction for fourth-quarter revenue being in a range of between $18.8-19.6 billion, and also beat an LSEG SmartEstimate of T$617.1 billion drawn from 21 analysts.

SmartEstimates give greater weighting to forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.

For December alone, TSMC reported that revenue fell 8.4% year-on-year to T$176.3 billion, which was down 14.4% compared with the previous month.

TSMC, Asia's most valuable publicly listed company with a market capitalisation of $491 billion, did not provide any details or forward guidance in its brief revenue statement.

It is due to report fourth-quarter earnings on Jan. 18, where it will also update its outlook for the current quarter and the year.

TSMC's Taipei-listed shares closed down 0.3% on Wednesday ahead of the release of the sales data. The broader market ended down 0.4%.

The shares surged 32% in 2023, compared with a 27% gain for the broader market. ($1 = 31.1220 Taiwan dollars) (Reporting by Faith Hung and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Kim Coghill and Muralikumar Anantharaman)