It is not every day that you can pick up the world's number three for a fraction over book value. But Chartered Semiconductor, majority-owned by Singapore's Temasek and soon to be sold to Abu Dhabi's Atic for $1.8bn, is not as inviting as its market share in contract chipmaking may suggest.

Ranking third is no guarantee of pricing power. This is a scale business and the market leader, Taiwan's TSMC, is so dominant – with 49 per cent of the market, according to iSuppli – that its competitors are de facto secondary suppliers. Like its peers UMC and Vanguard of Taiwan, and China's SIMC, Chartered has had to keep pouring money into facility upgrades and research and development. Capital investment has averaged about half of sales over the past five years; cumulative losses since 2002 are five times bigger than profits.

On top of that is a peculiarly unhappy product mix: all customer segments, from wireless broadband to PC peripherals, have struggled. On almost every operating metric – gross margin, return on assets – Chartered comes off worse than peers. While second-quarter revenues rose 43 per cent from the first quarter, for example, others recorded at least 80 per cent growth. Chartered's capacity utilisation improved to 60 per cent, from 38. But breakeven – at a projected 75 per cent in the second half – still looks a long way off. Chartered has already pencilled in a loss for this quarter.