Corning Inc posted a sharp increase in its second-quarter profit yesterday thanks to strong sales of its glass for flat-panel televisions and mobile devices.
The world’s biggest maker of LCD glass earned US$913 million, or US$0.58 per share in the April-June period. This is up 49 percent from a profit of US$611 million, or US$0.39 per share, a year earlier.
Revenue climbed 23 percent to US$1.71 billion from US$1.4 billion.
The results surpassed Wall Street’s expectations. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected Corning to earn US$0.52 cents per share on revenue of US$1.65 billion.
LCD glass is Corning’s biggest business by far and the company commands nearly two-thirds of the LCD glass market. Chief financial officer James Flaws said the company sees “substantial growth opportunities” in this segment as LCD television sets start to spread to emerging markets. And Corning expects China to soon become the world’s largest market for these TVs.
The company, which also makes ceramic auto-pollution filters and is the world’s largest producer of optical fiber and cable, said all its segments did well during the quarter, but the latter, its telecommunications business, was a standout. Sales in this unit rose 21 percent sequentially and 1 percent year-over-year to US$441 million, boosted in part by new fiber-to-home projects in Canada.
Strong sales of the ultra-thin, chemically strengthened Gorilla glass used in mobile devices drove sales in Corning’s specialty materials segment up 54 percent from a year earlier, to US$125 million.
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