Siliconware Precision Industries Co (SPIL, 矽品), the world’s second-largest chip tester and packager, said it expected revenue to show single-digit growth this quarter from the second quarter after reporting a nearly 65 percent increase in earnings from last quarter.
Net income was NT$1.47 billion (US$48.89 million) in the second quarter, up 64.98 percent from NT$891 million in the first quarter and 30.09 percent higher than NT$1.13 billion in the corresponding period last year.
The company’s consolidated revenue for the second quarter was NT$16.55 billion, representing 9.4 percent growth from the previous quarter and a 12.3 percent increase from a year ago.
Gross margin was 19.3 percent in the second quarter, up from 14.7 percent in the first quarter and 15.6 percent a year ago, the company’s data showed.
SPIL chairman Bough Lin (林文伯) said the increase in gross margin last quarter was the highest in the past 10 quarters.
For this quarter, SPIL expects revenue to grow by between 2 and 5 percent from the second quarter based on strong demand for information and communication products, Lin told investors at a Taipei conference.
Lin said strong demand for information and communications products and a slew of new products to be launched in the second half of the year are going to benefit the overall semiconductor industry, despite negative macroeconomic factors.
He said he was also optimistic about the company’s outlook in the fourth quarter.
The company will also leave its capital expenditure unchanged at NT$17.5 billion this year, he added.
Credit Suisse yesterday welcomed SPIL’s latest financial results.
“We have a buy rating for [SPIL’s] stock. Not only because they are doing well in business, but also because their profitability and margins are coming in better, which is a good surprise,” Credit Suisse equity research managing director Randy Abrams wrote in a note.
“The fact [that] they are doing more copper wirebonding, which keeps their cost down, they have made their manufacturing more efficient, the price of gold has come down and the depreciation of NT dollars all contribute to their better possibilities,” Abrams said.
Based on SPIL’s data, its copper and silver alloy wirebonding accounted for 46.3 percent of revenue in the second quarter, compared with 34.2 percent in the first quarter, and is expected to go up to 60 percent in the third quarter, Lin said.
Shares in SPIL rose 4.36 percent to NT$29.90 ahead of the company’s release of its second-quarter results.
The stock has risen 10.33 percent since the beginning of the year, compared with a 0.74 percent rise in the TAIEX over the same period, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
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