China Steel Corp (中鋼), the nation’s biggest steelmaker with 11 million tonnes of annual capacity, saw its first-quarter pretax profit drop 26.7 percent to NT$13.13 billion (US$418.3 million) from NT$17.91 billion in the third quarter, the company said yesterday.
The first-quarter profit compares with a pretax loss of NT$9.57 billion the firm posted a year earlier, when demand was weak amid the global recession.
The company attributed the decline in quarterly earnings mainly to “the decreased recognition of gains from investments under the equity method,” it said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
Citigroup analysts said the discrepancy mainly came from investment income.
China Steel booked NT$2.45 billion in investment income in the first quarter, compared with NT$5.6 billion in the previous quarter.
First-quarter revenue rose 6.35 percent to NT$53.24 billion from NT$50.06 billion in the previous quarter, and surged 45.46 percent from NT$36.6 billion a year ago. For last month alone, the company posted sales of NT$19.36 billion, the highest since October of last year and up 26.14 percent from the previous month, the company’s earlier tallies showed.
Production volume was 2.42 million tonnes in the first three months, up from 2.27 million tonnes in the previous three months, while sales volume totaled 2.43 million tonnes, compared with 2.27 million tonnes in the previous quarter, the company said.
Citigroup said in a client note yesterday that China Steel’s first-quarter financial results beat its forecast, citing rising shipments amid a global market recovery as the main reason.
“Downstream steel makers continued to re-stock due to healthy demand and anticipation of rising steel prices,” analysts Peter Kurz and Timothy Chen wrote in the note.
High material costs in coking coal and iron ore, which began to impact China Steel’s cost structure earlier this year, has prompted the company to raise domestic steel prices three times this year for a total of 17.8 percent. On April 9, the company announced it was raising domestic steel prices for June delivery by 10 percent and said more hikes are in the pipeline for the third quarter.
Citigroup analysts said they expected the company to post strong volume growth amid continued steel price hikes in the second quarter.
“However, higher than expected cost increases could erode not only margins but dollar profits. Thus, despite the better-than-expected first-quarter results, we are not changing our full-year forecast,” they wrote.
China Steel is expected to report a net profit of NT$33.61 billion this year, or NT$2.56 per share, compared with a net profit of NT$19.1 billion or NT$1.46 per share last year, Citigroup’s forecast said. Capital Securities Corp (群益證券) forecast last week that the firm would post NT$35 billion in net income this year, or NT$2.66 per share.
Shares of China Steel rose 0.58 percent yesterday to NT$34.95 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The stock has risen 5.91 percent so far this year, outperforming a 0.2 percent decline on the benchmark TAIEX.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the