Tycoon Group Enterprise Co (聚亨企業), which makes fasteners and steel wire rods, yesterday said that it would expand the capacity of its electric arc furnace in Thailand to 700,000 tonnes of iron ore a year from 500,000 tonnes a year by the end of next quarter, allowing the company to reduce its iron ore inventory.
“With the new capacity we can use more iron scraps [for production], as the prices of iron ore are more volatile than those of iron scraps,” Ho Ying-tien (侯英典), special assistant to the company chairman, told reporters on Thursday. “Sometimes we are not able to buy the necessary amount of iron ore when the demand is high.”
In addition, as Thailand imports 5 million tonnes of iron ore a year, the company can also sell iron ore in the market, company chairman Kenny Huang (黃文松) said.
Until the capacity expansion has been completed, the company has to keep an inventory of 150,000 to 160,000 tonnes of iron ore, making it vulnerable to declining prices of iron ore, Huang said.
The company registered losses of NT$259.46 million (US$8.8 million) during the January-to-September period, up from NT$59.17 million a year ago, according to the company’s filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
In addition to falling prices of the iron ore in its inventory, market sentiment for steel wire rods was low this year, as the government aims to open up the local market to imports of steel wire rods containing boron from China next year, Huang said.
“Many downstream firms reduced their inventory as they waited for the prices to drop,” Huang said.
Commenting on the government’s decision to relax restrictions on Chinese imports, Huang said the government should learn from other governments in Southeast Asia to impose taxes on such imports, as the Chinese government offers subsidies on boron-containing steel wire rods manufactured in China.
Sales of steel wire rods account for 70 percent of Tycoon Group’s revenue, the company said.
From January through last month, the company posted revenue of NT$8.76 billion, down 1.35 percent from NT$8.88 billion a year ago, the filing showed.
While it is unlikely that the company would swing back into the black this year, the outlook for next year is more positive, as the Thai government plans to spend 2 trillion baht (US$63 billion) on infrastructure construction, Huang said.
Tycoon Group’s shares rose 0.18 percent to NT$5.52 yesterday, underperforming the TAIEX, which was up 0.52 percent.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”