Elpida Memory Inc’s bankruptcy protection filing might have a mixed impact on the nation’s memorychip industry.
Memory module maker Adata Technology Co (威剛科技) said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday that the bankruptcy protection filing announced by Japan-based Elpida, one of the world’s biggest memorychip makers, had no impact on it due to its diversification strategy of purchasing memorychips.
Memorychip makers Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電子) and Powerchip Technology Corp (力晶科技) said Elpida’s bankruptcy protection filing had a limited impact on their business, because they have no accounts receivable due from Elpida.
Powerchip, which has a production and marketing partnership with Elpida, said it had stopped its DRAM supply to Elpida in the fourth quarter of last year amid the sector’s slowing demand.
However, Elpida’s bankruptcy might bring Rexchip Electronics Corp (瑞晶電子), a local PC DRAM venture between Powerchip and Elpida that is entering the mass-production stage of Elpida’s 30-nanometer (nm) products, under some pressure.
Despite Rexchip having stopped shipments to Elpida temporarily on Monday, the company reported US$76.4 million in accounts receivable from Elpida for last month and posted US$58.7 million in sales to Elpida, company statistics showed.
That total of US$135.1 million might not be paid to Rexchip in the short term, affecting the company’s cash flow, the company said.
“We will discuss with Powerchip, our major stockholder, seeking a new sales model to Elpida in the future, which will basically be cash transactions,” Rexchip said in its stock exchange filing.
Walton Advanced Engineering Inc (華東科技), a domestic memory assembly and testing service provider, will also be affected by Elpida’s bankruptcy.
Powertech Technology Inc (力成科技), the nation’s biggest computer memorychip packager, will also likely be majorly affected by Elpida’s bankruptcy, a Barclays Capital’s research report said yesterday.
Barclays Capital analyst Andrew Lu (陸行之) said the brokerage house expected to see a one-off loss for Powertech of as much as NT$6 billion (US$203 million) to NT$7 billion, or NT$8 to NT$9 per share, on earnings in a worst-case scenario, compared with the consensus estimate for the company’s earnings per share of NT$7.62 this year and NT$9.48 next year.
However, the loss would only happen in the worst-case scenario, which means Powertech has not yet decided whether to collect its accounts receivables from Elpida and write off its loss, Lu said.
Powertech said its accounts receivables due from Elpida totaled NT$4.5 billion as of yesterday, accounting for 5.4 percent of its assets.
In the meantime, Barclays’ global DRAM research team sees the main beneficiaries of Elpida’s bankruptcy as Samsung Electronics Co and Hynix Semiconductor Inc of South Korea, as well as US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc.
That means the Nanya-Micron camp, such as Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) and Inotera Memories Inc (華亞科技) in Taiwan, might also benefit.
Powerchip spokesman Eric Tang (譚仲民) also said he expected Elpida’s bankruptcy to be positive for the memorychip market.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS