Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (力晶半導體), the nation’s biggest computer chipmaker, yesterday reported a nearly 18 percent decline in sales for last month.
Net sales declined 17.69 percent to NT$5.11 billion (US$168 million) last month, from NT$6.21 billion a year ago, the Hsinchu-based chipmaker said in a statement.
But on a monthly basis, last month’s sales represented about 12.5 percent improvement, compared to NT$4.54 billion in March, the company said.
“That is because of growth in shipments and small recovery in spot prices for standard dynamic random access memory [DRAM] chips,” company spokesman Eric Tan (譚仲民) said.
Tan said Powerchip would out-perform its peers in the second quarter because it was largely making high-density, cost effective 1Gb DDR2 DRAM chips.
The spot price of mainstream 1Gb/DDR2/128Mx8/667MHZ held steady at US$2.16 on average yesterday, Taipei-based researcher DRAMeXchange Technology Inc (集邦科技) said.
The company reported the fourth quarterly losses for the first quarter at NT$9.74 billion, which represented an improvement compared to losses of NT$14.11 billion in the final quarter of last year.
Shares of Powerchip fell 1.97 percent to NT$12.45 yesterday.
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