Local chip designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原科技) said yesterday its net income reached NT$265 million (US$8.27 million), or NT$0.72 in earnings per share (EPS), in the quarter from April to last month on record-high revenue of NT$1.6 billion.
The second-quarter profit was 25.7 percent higher than the figure the Hsinchu-based company reported in the previous quarter, when it posted NT$211 million in profit, or NT$0.58 in EPS.
Despite this quarterly figure, it still represented a 0.6 percent drop from NT$266 million, or NT$0.74 EPS, from a year earlier, Faraday said in an e-mailed statement.
Faraday’s business covers low-margin application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design solutions. The fabless firm also provides high-margin silicon intellectual property (IP) rights and non-recurring engineering (NRE) services for its ASIC customers.
In the second quarter, IP revenue increased 11 percent from the previous quarter, a rise of 5.1 percent in ASIC revenue and 45.4 percent more from NRE fees, which the company said was a result of more deliveries of engineering samples.
Overall, second-quarter revenue grew 8.9 percent to a record NT$1.6 billion from NT$1.47 billion in the previous quarter, up 16.3 percent from NT$1.38 billion a year ago, the company’s data showed.
While low-margin ASIC accounted for about 80 percent of the company’s revenue, Faraday said it still managed to maintain its gross margin at 42.4 percent in the second quarter, compared with 42.5 percent in the first three months.
Faraday said it expected growth momentum to remain strong in the third quarter and to continue through the end of the year, mainly because of strong demand for display and multimedia items and increasing shipments of USB 3.0 applications.
“However, due to capacity constraints and decelerating growth in consumer applications, overall revenue is expected to see moderate quarter-on-quarter growth,” Faraday said in the statement.
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