E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技), which manufactures the displays used in 90 percent of the world’s e-readers, including Amazon’s Kindle series, posted a weaker profit of NT$1.26 billion (US$42.6 million) for the fourth quarter of last year because of increased shipments of lower-margin LCD panels and product transition.
The figure was a decline of 33.26 percent year-on-year and a plunge of 43.12 percent quarter-on-quarter.
Revenue was NT$10.49 billion, up 8 percent year-on-year, but down 4 percent quarter-on-quarter.
The decline in profit was because of the higher shipments of fringe field switching (FFS) LCD panels, which offer lower margins than the company’s flagship product — e-paper — E Ink chairman Scott Liu (劉思誠) said at an investors’ conference yesterday.
For the whole of last year, profit rose 62 percent to a record NT$6.53 billion, or NT$6.05 per share.
Total revenue last year was NT$38.43 billion, up 53 percent from 2010.
Liu said this year would be a “challenging year full of uncertainties,” mainly because of the possible fallout from the unresolved eurozone debt crisis.
“Clients are conservative and said the market visibility is low,” he said, adding that E Ink would no longer provide shipment targets or projections in a response to clients’ requests.
However, he said that revenue would bottom out in the seasonally slow first quarter as clients were digesting inventories.
According to Citigroup, the weaker revenue momentum in the first quarter was mainly because US clients had built up advanced inventory supplies early in the fourth quarter last year for the holiday season.
“However, we expect growth to resume as major brands will release new touch e-readers for the coming hot season in the third quarter this year,” a Citigroup report said last week said.
E Ink is set to benefit from the increasing adoption of FFS displays for smartphone and tablet applications, which will drive up the company’s earnings.
The proliferation of the non-Apple tablet market — Amazon’s Kindle Fire in particular — would potentially fuel the adoption of FFS panels and help revive E Ink’s LCD business, Citigroup said.
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