Rising orders from downstream industries for the next two months are likely to help China Steel Corp (中鋼) swing to profit in the second quarter, company officials said yesterday.
The Greater Kaohsiung-based company has seen increasing demand from domestic customers recently, despite a price increase of 1.11 percent on average for April-May deliveries from this month’s levels, they said.
“Orders in the second quarter are better than expected,” China Steel public relations officer Hung Jui-pen (洪瑞彬) said by telephone yesterday, confirming a report by the Chinese-language online news outlet Cnyes.com.
“The global steel industry has shown signs of bottoming out recently after Chinese steelmakers began cutting production late last year to help digest a surplus,” Hung said.
10 PERCENT RISE
The Cnyes.com report said China Steel, the nation’s largest and only integrated steelmaker, might see orders increase by up to 10 percent sequentially in the second quarter, citing company president Andrew Sung’s (宋志育) comments at a media gathering in Taipei.
Sung said the company expected to secure 2.75 million tonnes in orders next quarter, compared with about 2.5 million tonnes this quarter.
For the full year, the company expects orders to reach 9.15 million tonnes, he added.
China Steel sold 9.17 million tonnes of steel products last year, company data showed. Hung confirmed these figures.
The company reported a loss of NT$573 million in the October-to-December quarter, its first quarterly loss in more than two years. In the first two months of the year, the company saw a combined loss of NT$1.31 billion (US$442.3 million) amid still-weak domestic demand.
Hung said the company would likely see small losses or even break even in the first quarter, but it could turn profitable next quarter, given improved market conditions.
SPECIALTY STEEL
“We will try to sell more high-priced specialty steel products for the rest of this month, hoping to cut losses for the quarter as much as we can,” Hung said.
He declined to provide an estimate on earnings for next quarter.
Last year, China Steel saw its net profit plunge 48.1 percent to NT$19.5 billion (US$659.1 million) from a net income of NT$37.59 billion the year before on the back of falling steel prices and rising raw material costs.
Its earnings per share were NT$1.36 last year, compared with NT$2.83 in 2010.
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day