Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (CPT, 中華映管), the nation’s No. 3 flat-panel maker, yesterday reported its eighth consecutive quarterly loss as the European debt crisis and excess inventory at Chinese customers hurt demand and prices.
The Taoyuan-based LCD panel maker said the price drop had not hit the bottom last month as it had originally thought.
Because of the low visibility of market demand this quarter, “our priority is to strictly manage our own inventories,” company president Lin Sheng-chang (林盛昌) said. “We don’t rule out cutting output.”
In the second quarter, CPT posted losses of NT$1.49 billion (US$46.5 million), improving from losses of NT$2.99 billion in the first quarter and NT$9.74 billion one year ago.
Gross margin swung into the positive for the first time in eight quarters to 5.2 percent, compared with minus-1.3 percent in the first quarter and minus-54.9 percent a year earlier.
The company expects demand to pick up late next month, driven by seasonal demand, with shipments of PC and TV panels likely to grow 8 percent this quarter from 6.76 million units the previous quarter.
Smaller rival HannStar Display Corp (瀚宇彩晶) yesterday also reported losses of NT$428 million for the second quarter, an improvement from losses of NT$891 million in the first quarter.
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
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained