The powerful earthquake that hit Japan on Friday and the subsequent electricity rationing will not severely disrupt supply in the memorychip and LCD sectors, as most manufacturers have sufficient inventory and have been able to shift to Taiwanese companies for supplies, analysts said yesterday.
Potential supply constraints might be seen in passive components and NAND flash memory, which is primarily used in smartphones and tablets, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said -yesterday in Taipei.
However, based on the initial survey, “the memory and LCD supply chain is relatively safe,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst Simon Woo told a press briefing in Taipei.
“Many companies said the impact from Japan’s earthquake could be minor,” Woo said.
Those companies, including Taiwan’s PC memory chipmaker Inotera Memories Inc (華亞科技), have piled up enough raw materials for them to use over the next three to four weeks and they expect Japanese raw material -suppliers will recover production during that period, Woo said.
Japan represents about 10 percent of the global supply of PC computer memory chips and less than 10 percent of global LCD panels, Woo said, adding that the production of many core components in making LCD panels such as glass and polarizers were highly diversified to areas other than Japan.
Many of the products from “NEC and Reneses are pretty standard products that can be quickly replicated or quickly switched toward Taiwan,” analyst Dan Heyler, also of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said during the same media briefing.
That has been reflected in the price hikes of PC memory chips, which slowed to 0.72 percent as of yesterday evening, compared with an almost 7 percent rise on Monday, the first trading day after the quake, according to Taipei-based price tracker TrendForce Corp (集邦科技).
Tony Tseng (曾省吾), head of Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Taiwan research, attributed the drastic decline in local stock prices to Taiwan’s reliance on Japan for equipment and petrochemical supplies.
However, Tseng said the short-term shock provided a buying point for investors. The brokerage said recent panic sell-offs reflected investor concerns over uncertainties.
Tseng retained a positive view on the Taiwan stock market in the medium and long-term as the nation’s economy would continue to be boosted by robust domestic demand.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts