The stock price of TPK Holding Co Ltd (宸鴻) fell 1.16 percent yesterday after its board decided to distribute a meager 0.05 percent in stock dividends, meaning a payout ratio as low as 2 percent.
The stock’s decline was bigger than the benchmark TAIEX, which slid 0.87 percent. Shares of TPK, which supplies touch panels for Apple Inc’s iPad tablets and iPhones, closed down NT$15 at NT$850.
The drop reflected investors’ disappointment with TPK’s dividend policy given the prevailing trend of companies paying high cash dividends and less stock dividends to avoid share dilution.
Last year, TPK more than doubled its net profit to NT$4.74 billion, or NT$23 per share, from NT$2.31 billion, or NT$12.26 a share, in 2009.
Despite the solid growth, TPK chose to take a more conservative dividend policy.
“TPK generated less cash from its operations, compared with the investment it made last year,” company financial executive Freddie Liu (劉詩亮) told local cable TV network UBN.
Last year, TPK generated about NT$5.94 billion from its operations, but spent more than NT$11.65 billion on new equipment and assets for manufacturing, according to a company filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Another iPad touch panel supplier, Wintek Corp (勝華), has decided to distribute cash dividends of NT$1.04 per share based on its net income of NT$2.06 billion, or NT$1.67 per share, last year. That would translate into a payout ratio of about 62 percent.
Wintek’s share price, which has taken a beating in recent weeks, plunged 3.15 percent to NT$52.30 yesterday.
TPK is scheduled to release its first-quarter results and its business outlook on May 4.
Separately, Apple has added Chimei Innolux Corp (奇美電子) as its third supplier of sensors for the iPad 2’s touch screen, Bloomberg Newswire reported yesterday, citing two people familiar with the matter.
Chimei, the nation’s biggest LCD panel maker, will begin supplying the components next month, the report said.
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