Royal Philips Electronics NV, the world’s largest lighting maker, said yesterday its third quarter earnings were down sharply from a year ago, hurt by falling sales, weaker margins and losses at its TV joint venture.
Net profit was 74 million euros (US$102 million) from 524 million euros in the same period a year ago, the company said. Revenues declined 1.3 percent to 5.39 billion euros. Philips said sales would have risen 6 percent if not for the strong euro.
Philips is responding by cutting 4,500 jobs, which it says will help it save 800 million euros annually.
“We do not expect to realize a material performance improvement in the near term,” Philips chief executive Frans van Houten said in a statement.
He said the company would have at least 4 percent sales growth and 10 percent operating margins by 2013.
At the company’s lighting arm, operating profit was 110 million euros, down from 193 million -euros, which Philips attributed to weaker consumer sales and higher raw materials costs. However, the company said it had won some big clients, including France’s Carrefour and “a global Swedish furniture retailer,” presumably IKEA.
At the company’s healthcare arm, operating profit fell to 261 million euros against 282 million euros. In consumer electronics, operating profits fell to 102 million euros from 169 million euros, mostly due to lower margins.
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