Macronix International Co (
The company posted net profit of NT$500 million (US$14.3 million) for the three-month business quarter ending June 30, down from NT$1.6 billion (US$46 million) during the same period last year.
Macronix president Miin Wu (
The dotcom companies responsible for sending chip sales skyrocketing last year are now gone, so the market will have to wait for sales of computers and communications products to soak up excess supply, he said.
Macronix designs and manufactures memory chip products for mobile phones, computer printers and game machines. In the third quarter, analysts believe sales of Nintendo's Game Cube should spur demand for Macronix's Mask-ROM (read only memory) memory chips. These chips also go into Hewlett-Packard Co printers and store information like software and data even when a device is shut off.
The company also announced a new digital camera controller chip for use in Minolta Dimage 7 cameras yesterday, which converts each image into digital form before saving it in memory.
Wu said his firm expects to ramp up production on these new chips in two or three months, at a rate of 300,000 chips per month.
Despite the new products, Wu expects his company's utilization rate, which gauges the amount of chip manufacturing lines actually churning out products, to fall from 90 percent during the first half of the year to 70 percent in the third quarter.
"The company seems determined to sacrifice short-term profits in order to develop their own products ... [but] I think the company is on the right track in developing their own intellectual property," said Chris Hsieh, semiconductor analyst at ING Barings in Taipei.
Many of Macronix's products are special-order-chips for use in specific products, such as flash memory for cellphones and Mask-ROM memory for game machines and printers. Macronix designs many of these products to customer specifications.
Due to its emphasis on memory chips, Macronix tends to be lumped together with other memory chip makers like Micron and Samsung -- but these companies make a very different kind of memory chip.
Micron and Samsung produce DRAM memory chips, predominantly used in computers and sold as commodities on open markets in the same fashion as oil. The memory products Macronix makes are not sold as commodities.
Hsieh warned that a change in technologies to third generation mobile Internet-capable cellphones by one of Macronix's biggest customers, Mitsubishi, could take away orders for flash memory and 4 megabit SRAM chips from the firm later this year. Competition from Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (力晶半導體), another Taiwanese manufacturer, is also likely to catch on by the end of the year.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last