China Steel Corp (CSC, 中鋼), the nation’s largest integrated steel maker, yesterday said its third-quarter pretax profit fell 45.92 percent to NT$5.4 billion (US$179 million) from the previous quarter because of lower sales and higher raw material costs.
CSC’s third-quarter figure was 48.55 percent less than the NT$110.5 billion the company posted the previous year, company data showed.
Revenue fell 2.84 percent to NT$61.87 billion in the third quarter from the second quarter, CSC said in an e-mailed statement. The figure was 4.75 percent lower than a year ago.
Sales volume was 2.3 million tonnes in the third quarter, down from 2.38 million tonnes in the second quarter and compared with 2.52 million tonnes the previous year, company data showed.
Based on the company’s 15.05 billion issued shares, earnings per share were NT$0.36 in the third quarter, down from NT$0.7 in the previous three months and NT$0.77 a year ago.
The falling pretax profit “mainly came from lower sales volume and higher costs of coking coal and iron ore, as well as the decrease in the recognition of gains from investments,” the company said in the statement.
In the first nine months of the year, the company’s pretax profit totaled NT$22.71 billion, 40.16 percent lower than the same period last year, with earnings per share of NT$1.51, according to CSC.
CSC shares fell 1.34 percent to NT$29.4 yesterday after the company disclosed the quarterly figures, compared with a decline of 1.36 percent on the benchmark TAIEX.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to