X-Legend Entertainment Co (傳奇網路遊戲), one of Taiwan’s top game makers, yesterday said it plans to debut its shares on the secondary bourse next month to tap local capital markets.
The company is scheduled to issue 2.77 million shares on the GRETAI Securities Market on Dec. 13, with a price per share ranging from NT$150 to NT$160 (US$4.9 to US$5.3).
The game maker posted NT$223 million in earnings for the first three quarters of the year, which translated into earning per share (EPS) of NT$10.74.
That made the company the most profitable game maker in Taiwan, with rivals MacroWell OMG Digital Entertainment Co (歐買尬) posting an EPS of NT$10.07, and Chinese Gamer International Corp (中華網龍) posting NT$3.16.
X-Legend, which was founded in 2002, made losses in 2008 and 2009 and only moved back into the black last year when it earned NT$95.11 million.
The turnaround came aftergame titles Finding Neverland Online (聖境傳說) and JS Online (劍狐傳奇) attracted large numbers of players and the firm was able to collect -licensing fees from 15 countries that distribute its games.
X-Legend has set its sights on releasing at least three new titles a year starting from next year and it aims to license each title to at least five overseas markets, company president Nelson Chang (張峰旗) said.
“The life span of a MMORPG [massive multiplayer online role-playing game] is short, with only about six months before the excitement subsides and users switch to new games,” he said. “We have to constantly come up with new titles to appeal to players.”
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