Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s No. 4 computer maker, yesterday said it would gain NT$158 million (US$5.44 million) in profits by selling all the shares it owns in a local electronics retail chain as part of the company’s efforts to refocus on its core PC business.
The Taipei-based company said it planned to sell 6.54 million common shares of E-Life Mall Corp (全國電子) for NT$340 million, at a price of no less than NT$50 per share, Acer said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
The sale is aimed at helping the company concentrate on the operation of its core PC business and better utilizing company resources via offloading non-core businesses at a proper time, Acer said in the filing.
Before the transaction, Acer’s stake in E-Life was about 6.59 percent, it said.
The announcement came after Acer posted a loss for the second quarter of NT$6.79 billion, the company said last week.
The losses were made after the company exercised a huge US$150 million inventory write-off and spent US$30 million restructuring its European unit, including severance pay for former high-ranking executives.
The company’s board yesterday also signed off on the management’s financial report for the first six months, during which Acer posted a net loss of NT$5.64 billion. As of June 30, Acer booked more than NT$22.7 billion cash and cash equivalent, according to a separate stock exchange filing yesterday.
Separately, Acer announced yesterday it would promote Lilia Wang (王美麗), global controller of the operation finance unit, to the company’s chief financial officer in charge of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) operations, a move that is designed to help reconstruct the ailing division.
“Acer in EMEA is currently going through changes in its business model and financial management focus. Wang has been chosen to step into the role of EMEA CFO for her long experience in financial audit and control,” the company said in an e-mailed statement.
Wang will continue to be the company’s global controller and her new position takes effect today. She will replace Tu Che-min (杜哲民), who will remain the company’s chief financial executive, Acer said.
Acer shares rose 6.71 percent to end at NT$35 on the stock exchange before announcements about the share sale of E-Life Mall and Wang’s appointment. The stock has plunged 61.15 percent so far this year versus a decline of 13.72 percent on the TAIEX.
This story has been updated since it was first published.
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
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
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],”
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