Two major Japanese electronics companies, Matsushita Electric Industrial Corp and Sharp Corp, announced upbeat earnings yesterday on robust demand for consumer electronics, though Matsushita, which makes Panasonic-brand products, said plasma TV sales dipped on sliding prices.
Net income at Osaka-based Matsushita jumped 9.7 percent in the April-June quarter to ?39.31 billion (US$327.34 million) in the April-June period from ?35.83 billion a year earlier, buoyed by digital cameras and car electronics.
Revenue increased 4.8 percent to ?2.240 trillion from ?2.137 trillion a year earlier, as solid sales overseas helped offset a less-than-stellar performance in Japan.
Sales of digital cameras and car electronics and the yen's weakness helped boost foreign sales by 8 percent, Matsushita said.
But falling prices of plasma TVs hurt profits.
Matsushita chief financial officer Makoto Uenoyama said the average selling price of a Matsushita plasma TV fell 29 percent in the quarter, in line with an overall fall in prices for plasma TVs.
That led to a 1 percent decrease in plasma TV sales for the quarter to ?128.9 billion (US$1.07 billion), the first time sales dropped in that sector, Uenoyama said.
For the full year, the company revised downward its group profit to ?246 billion from ?250 billion, on sales of ?8.780 trillion.
Meanwhile, profits at Sharp, also based in Osaka, edged up 1.4 percent in the latest quarter.
The sales were led by sales of large flat-screen televisions, mobile phones and other products, the Japanese maker announced yesterday.
Sharp, known for the Aquos brand of liquid-crystal-display TVs, posted a net income of ?24.22 billion for the April-June period, up from ?23.89 billion a year earlier.
Sales increased 14.7 percent to ?796.01 billion from ?693.70 billion the previous year, buoyed by a 37.6 percent surge in audiovisual equipment, including LCD TVs and mobile phones, the company said in a statement.
Sharp has managed to avoid the devastating fall in flat-panel TV prices by pushing its higher-end models.
Though market prices for LCD TVs fell about 30 percent, Sharp's average price for those TVs rose 4 percent in the latest quarter, according to company spokesman Kyo Otani.
Sharp left unchanged its forecast of ?105.00 billion (US$873.82 million) in net income for the year ending this March 31, a 3.2 percent increase over the previous year.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS