Asia Pacific Broadband Wireless Communications Inc (亞太行動寬頻), the nation's first three-generation (3G) mobile operator, said it hoped to get into the black early next year, helped partly by better cost efficiency through internal resource integration, a company executive said yesterday.
"With the help of resource integration and improving 3G coverage, we expect Asia Pacific to break even in the first quarter of next year," chairman Wang Lin-tai (王令台) said.
Asia Pacific Broadband Wireless Communications is expecting to achieve a 10 percent to 15 percent cost reduction from ongoing restructuring efforts involving its parent company Eastern Broadband Telecom Co (東森寬頻), a fixed-line telecom carrier, and Asia Pacific Online Services Inc (亞太線上), an Internet service provider.
Wang declined to reveal the specific reductions, only said the three companies will have a total of NT$14.7 billion in revenue this year. He did not provide comparative figures of last year.
Wang made the remarks during a press conference announcing the inclusion of three companies into the Asia Pacific Telecom Group (
Eastern Broadband has been renamed Asia Pacific Broadband Telecom Co (
A steering committee led by Wang was formed yesterday to take charge of the group's integration in marketing, Internet engineering and strategy, Wang said.
"The restructuring will help Asia Pacific reduce costs, but the effect will be minimal. I still believe that the company will have a rough road ahead to try and turn itself around," said Chris Tan (
"Spotty coverage is one of major hurdles the 3G pioneer has to overcome to convince users to switch from 2.5G mobile operators led by state-run Chunghwa Tele-com Co (中華電信)," Tan said.
The state-owned phone company has said that it plans to launch its 3G service in the third quarter.
Private-sector competitors Tai-wan Cellular Corp (
After a year of operation, Asia Pacific has only attracted 300,000 subscribers for its 3G services, far less than its target of getting 700,000 users in the first five months.
Asia Pacific's 3G service debuted in late July last year.
To expand its coverage to remote areas, Asia Pacific plans to pour between NT$2 billion and NT$3 billion into base station deployment within the next year, Wang said.
He refused to reveal how many base stations the company has. At the service launch last July, the company said it had already set up 600 base stations.
Asia Pacific is scheduled to offer two to three new handsets at affordable prices during the rest of the year in a bid to expand its customer base including one high-end cellphone from Samsung Electronics Co.
The company yesterday said it aims to boost its subscriber list to as many as 550,000 people by the year-end now that users have a wider selection of handsets and affordable fixed-price packages.
SEMICONDUCTORS: The German laser and plasma generator company will expand its local services as its specialized offerings support Taiwan’s semiconductor industries Trumpf SE + Co KG, a global leader in supplying laser technology and plasma generators used in chip production, is expanding its investments in Taiwan in an effort to deeply integrate into the global semiconductor supply chain in the pursuit of growth. The company, headquartered in Ditzingen, Germany, has invested significantly in a newly inaugurated regional technical center for plasma generators in Taoyuan, its latest expansion in Taiwan after being engaged in various industries for more than 25 years. The center, the first of its kind Trumpf built outside Germany, aims to serve customers from Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia and South Korea,
Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Monday introduced the company’s latest supercomputer platform, featuring six new chips made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), saying that it is now “in full production.” “If Vera Rubin is going to be in time for this year, it must be in production by now, and so, today I can tell you that Vera Rubin is in full production,” Huang said during his keynote speech at CES in Las Vegas. The rollout of six concurrent chips for Vera Rubin — the company’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) computing platform — marks a strategic
Gasoline and diesel prices at domestic fuel stations are to fall NT$0.2 per liter this week, down for a second consecutive week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) announced yesterday. Effective today, gasoline prices at CPC and Formosa stations are to drop to NT$26.4, NT$27.9 and NT$29.9 per liter for 92, 95 and 98-octane unleaded gasoline respectively, the companies said in separate statements. The price of premium diesel is to fall to NT$24.8 per liter at CPC stations and NT$24.6 at Formosa pumps, they said. The price adjustments came even as international crude oil prices rose last week, as traders
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which supplies advanced chips to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday reported NT$1.046 trillion (US$33.1 billion) in revenue for last quarter, driven by constantly strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips, falling in the upper end of its forecast. Based on TSMC’s financial guidance, revenue would expand about 22 percent sequentially to the range from US$32.2 billion to US$33.4 billion during the final quarter of 2024, it told investors in October last year. Last year in total, revenue jumped 31.61 percent to NT$3.81 trillion, compared with NT$2.89 trillion generated in the year before, according to
RSS