China Shipbuilding Corp, Taiwan (CSBC, 台灣國際造船), the nation’s largest shipbuilder, will have no orders starting in November for 20 months after Israeli client Zim Integrated Shipping Services Ltd canceled its orders for six 1,700 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) ships, the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported yesterday.
The cancelation could impact on the company’s previous contracts with local clients, including Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp (陽明海運) and Wan Hai Lines Ltd (萬海航運), which may face postponement of deliveries, the report said, citing a letter from the firm’s union.
Fearing that they could lose their jobs because of a falling workload, nearly 500 company workers in Keelung plan to visit the firm’s Kaohsiung headquarters soon to urge the builder to avoid resorting to layoffs or salary cuts.
Admitting there were fewer orders at its Keelung shipyard, CSBC president Li Chih-cheng (李志城), however, urged workers not to panic, saying there would still be work to do.
Following canceled orders by Zim, the company was in active talks with potential clients such as state-run Taiwan Power Co (台電) and CPC Corp, Taiwan (中油) for new orders, Lee said.
CSBC vice president and spokesman Wang Ko-hsuan (王克旋) said that the company understood workers’ concerns, but the situation was really not so bad.
Moreover, the company could also bid for public works (to offset losses), he said.
Wang said that the company had promised during its initial public offerings that under normal circumstances it would not lay off staff or cut pay within five years.
However, CSBC does not rule out layoffs and pay cuts if economic conditions continue to deteriorate, Wang said.
Last year, CSBC reported revenue of NT$35.65 billion (US$1.05 billion). Net income was NT$846 million, or NT$1.27 in earnings per share.
The company built about 16 ships last year, although it is capable of manufacturing up to 18 ships a year, Li said.
For this year, the company estimated that it would have an output of between 14 and 15 ships, he said.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS