Local flat-panel maker Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (中華映管) yesterday said it would form a US$3 million venture in China with the world’s No. 2 laptop computer maker, Compal Electronics Co (仁寶電腦), to produce touch panel glasses.
The deal will deepen the companies’ cooperation in the booming touch panel business, which has surged because of increasing demand for tablet devices. It follows Compal’s purchase of a 4.5-generation color filter plant, to be converted into a facility for producing touch panel solutions (eg, touch sensors), from Chunghwa Picture for NT$1.4 billion (US$47.6 million) in December via a subsidiary.
DisplaySearch, a market research firm, estimated in December that global shipments of touch panels last year grew more than 30 percent from a year earlier to 20 million units as the adoption of touch panels extended to tablet devices from smartphones.
Taiwanese manufacturers seized almost 44 percent of global touch panel market share, DisplaySearch estimated.
Taoyuan-based Chunghwa Picture said the new investment was part of its plans to build a supply chain for touch panel production in China and was aimed at boosting revenue and profitability.
“The joint venture will help strengthen the company’s cost competitiveness, speed up our reaction to market changes and streamline the manufacturing flow,” company spokesman Wilbur Chien (簡永忠) said in a statement to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
Last week, Chunghwa Picture reported that losses expanded to NT$5.86 billion in the final quarter of last year, from losses of NT$4.98 billion in the third quarter.
In a separate filing, Compal said it would invest NT$16.82 million in HengHao Holding B Co Ltd (華樂光電, 福州) in Fujian Province, China, the Chinese joint venture with Chunghwa Picture, via a subsidiary to make and sell LCD glass.
The announcements came after a report by the Chinese-language newspaper the Economic Daily News yesterday that Compal planned to further invest in touch panel manufacturing to cope with growing demand for tablet devices, citing company spokesman Gary Lu (呂清雄).
Touch panels are a key component in producing tablets, Lu said.
Compal and Chunghwa Picture fell 0.54 percent and 1.48 percent to NT$36.80 and NT$3.99 respectively yesterday.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the