Epistar Corp (晶元光電), the nation’s biggest LED chipmaker, is likely to resume its growth momentum in the first quarter of next year in view of rising component restocking in China and South Korea after experiencing weakening demand and falling prices this quarter, Primasia Securities Co (犇亞證券) said yesterday.
“We forecast the company’s sales to grow by 25 percent to 30 percent year-on-year in 2011,” Primasia said in a client note yesterday.
Average selling prices (ASPs) for LEDs are forecast to face rising pressure after the expanding installation of new metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) equipment by companies next year, as well as a parity between supply and demand in the LED sector, Primasia said.
On average, MOCVD equipment can supply about 380,000 units of LCD TV backlights a year, JPMorgan said in an investment report on Nov. 24.
As the ASP may drop by a range of between 10 percent and 15 percent next year, Epistar is likely to expand its sales of high ASP margin TV and lighting LEDs by between 55 percent to 60 percent next year, from about 40 percent to 45 percent this year, to offset the downward pricing trend, Primasia said in the note.
Rider Chang (張世賢), Epistar’s vice president of finance and accounting, told reporters on Dec. 3 that the LED lighting business accounts for about 20 percent of its sales and LED backlighting makes up 50 percent.
JPMorgan said last month that Epistar is in the process of shifting its focus from TV backlights to lighting applications and is undertaking a fast product mix change in order to sustain its earnings growth.
Primasia yesterday maintained a long-term positive stance on Epistar and suggested investors load up on the company’s shares whenever pulling back occurs, after the Hsinchu-based company announced plans to issue US$280 million of zero-interest overseas convertible bonds over next two years to expand investment in a Chinese joint venture.
In a stock exchange filing on Thursday, Epistar said it would invest an additional US$19.5 million in United LED Shan Dong Corp (冠銓山東光電), a joint venture established in China with United Microelectronics Corp (聯電).
Following the expanded investment, Epistar’s investment in the Chinese joint venture will total US$27.5 million, with its stakeholding increasing to 55 percent from 50 percent, the filing said.
Shares of Epistar edged down 0.97 percent to NT$102 yesterday on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. So far this year, the stock has dropped 15 percent, underperforming the TAIEX’s 8.22 percent rise over the same period, the stock exchange’s data showed.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS