Shares in debt-ridden ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德科技) rallied by 5.63 percent after the DRAM chipmaker’s banks agreed to slash the interest on NT$57 billion (US$1.98 billion) in syndicated loans to just 0.1 percent, averting an imminent loan default.
ProMOS avoided the last slump, but the chipmaker is suffering a faster-than-expected relapse as the industry enters a downturn and is widely expected to be the first local PC DRAM company to go bankrupt.
After the interest reduction, the Hsinchu-based company is now required to pay just NT$4.48 million in interest a month, a big fall from the NT$114.8 million it had to pay when the interest rate stood at 3.5 percent, ProMOS said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Shares in ProMOS yesterday climbed NT$0.04 to NT$0.75, a level which remains a long way below the stock’s net value of NT$1.82 per share. The benchmark TAIEX rose 1.01 percent yesterday.
Creditor banks led by the state-owned Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行) plan to hold a new round of meetings next week to discuss new measures to help ProMOS reduce its debts, the Chinese-language Commercial Times reported yesterday.
The creditor banks could ask ProMOS to seek out strategic partners by issuing new shares following a reduction in capital or even sell a 12-inch factory, the newspaper said.
On Thursday night, ProMOS spokesman Ben Tseng (曾邦助) declined to comment on what further measures would be taken to resolve the debt crisis.
“We have nothing to say at the moment,” he told the Taipei Times by telephone on Thursday.
ProMOS lost NT$4.26 billion in the first three months of this year, a slight improvement on its loss of NT$4.75 billion in the final quarter of last year.
The price of benchmark DRAM chips dropped 0.15 percent to an average of US$1.32 per unit yesterday, after plunging about 20 percent last month from May as a result of sluggish demand for notebook computers, Taipei-based market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said.
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