Local telecom operator Asia Pacific Telecom Group (亞太電信集團) yesterday said its board had scrapped plans for NT$20 billion (US$658 million) in new share sales because of its improving financial situation.
The company’s decision came after it failed to find strategic partners to buy a stake by subscribing to new shares of unlisted Asia Pacific prior to a July 15 deadline.
The company had approached Japan’s No. 2 cellphone operator, KDDI Corp, to sell its shares.
The Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA, 台鐵) is the biggest shareholder of Asia Pacific, with a 12 percent share.
“We are not in a rush to raise funds by selling new shares as we are now making [enough] profit to support the company’s operation,” company spokeswoman Ester Chang (張瓊文) said by phone.
The company kept its goal of breaking even this year in terms of operating income, Chang said.
Helped by NT$3 billion in asset gains, Asia Pacific returned to profit last year with NT$0.02 per share, compared with a loss of NT$6.95 per share the previous year.
The company hopes to increase cellphone subscribers to 2 million by the end of this year, up about 60 percent from last year.
In April, the company canceled 50 percent of its outstanding shares to dilute accumulated losses. The company now has 3.28 billion outstanding shares, down from 6.58 billion shares.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by