Sanitar Co Ltd (凱撒衛浴), which makes sanitary ware under the Caesar brand, is set to debut its shares on the main board on Oct. 24 with an initial public offering price of NT$25 per share.
The company plans to raise NT$202.5 million (US$6.85 million) by issuing 8.1 million common shares.
“Raising money is not the main reason for us to go public,” Tony Hsiao (蕭俊祥), chairman and general manager of the company, said at the sideline of an investors’ conference yesterday.
“We want to increase the credibility of our brand and show that our financial statements are sound,” Hsiao said.
Sanitar, the third-largest sanitary ware supplier in Taiwan after Hocheng Corp (合成) and TOTO Ltd, reported NT$1.44 billion in revenue last year.
Sales in Taiwan accounted for 63 percent of last year’s total, while those in Vietnam, where Sanitar is the second-largest sanitary ware distributor, accounted for 36 percent.
In the January-to-August period, the company posted NT$1.08 billion in revenue, up 18.55 percent from NT$909.69 million a year ago, after its new factory in Vietnam became operational in the first quarter, the company said.
Hsiao expects revenue to see sequential growth next quarter on rising utilization and the approach of the high season.
The fourth quarter is traditionally the peak season for the company because many offices and homes renovate their sanitary equipment then, Hsiao said.
The company’s new factory in Vietnam is capable of producing 640,000 units of sanitary ware a year.
Overall, the company has a total capacity of making 1.6 million units of sanitary ware a year.
During the first six months of the year, the company reported profit of NT$74.44 million, or NT$1.15 per share, up 102 percent from NT$36.86 million, or NT$0.57 per share, a year ago, according to its filing to the stock exchange.
Currently listed on the Emerging Stock Market, the company’s shares rose 4.86 percent to NT$36.49 yesterday.
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