Samsung Electronics Co, Asia's largest electronics maker by market value, is seeing better-than-expected demand for handsets, flat screens and some types of semiconductors, an executive said.
First-quarter growth in shipments and profit margins are "much higher than expected" at the beginning of the year, Chu Woo-sik, head of Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung Electronics' investor and public relations, said in an interview yesterday.
Demand for liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and so-called Nand flash memory chips are exceeding company projections, he said.
The performance by Samsung, which earned a record 11 trillion won (US$11 billion) profit last year, contrasts with rivals such as Sony Corp, whose declining profits at its electronics business ultimately led to the replacement of the Japanese company's chief executive.
"So if you put everything into context, business is faring a lot better than initial expectations," Chu said.
Growth in Samsung's first quarter unit shipments for handsets is in the "mid-teens," compared with probable declines by competitors, Chu said.
First-quarter handset average price growth is in the "high-single digits," resulting in higher-than-expected profits, Chu said. He declined to give specific figures.
First-quarter average LCD prices are falling about 5 percent from the end of last year, Chu said. Monitor prices are stabilizing and declines in LCDs used in notebooks and televisions are slowing, he said.
Demand in the first quarter, which was projected to decline, is similar to that of the fourth quarter, Chu said.
Demand for so-called Nand chips, which are used in consumer electronics such as mobile phones and digital cameras, is also better than expected, Chu said. Growth is more than double the company's initial projections for 10 percent growth, he said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
RSS