Hota Industrial Manufacturing Co (和大工業), which makes gears and shafts for automobiles, motorcycles and tractors, yesterday said that it aims to increase revenue by 23 percent this year based on strong global growth in the car industry.
The company expects sales to rise to NT$4.6 billion (US$153 million) this year, from last year’s NT$3.73 billion.
“The market sentiment for car industry in the US, China, South Korea and Japan is rising, and the situation in Europe also started improving from the second half of last year,” Hota chairman and chief executive officer David Shen (沈國榮) told reporters.
The company said it has received orders of NT$100 million from new France-based client AGCO Corp this year to ship 4,000 gear units for the world’s third-biggest selling tractor.
AGCO is planning to increase orders to NT$375 million next year and to NT$625 million in 2016, Hota said.
Orders from US-based BorgWarner Inc, the company’s largest client, are set to increase to NT$1.25 billion this year, from NT$900 million last year, after Hota received notification from Borg Warner that its customer, Toyota Motor Co, wanted to start receiving parts, the company said.
Hota started shipping 9,000 torque converter units a month to BorgWarner last month. After the assembly process, BorgWarner sells the end products to Toyota, it said.
The record NT$3.73 billion revenue posted by the company last year is 84.65 percent higher than the NT$2.02 billion revenue it reported in 2012, according to the company.
“Because of the company’s growth, we have promised to raise our employees’ salaries by about 5 percent next year,” Shen said, adding that this would be the fourth consecutive year that the company has raised its employees’ salaries.
WASHINGTON’S INCENTIVES: The CHIPS Act set aside US$39 billion in direct grants to persuade the world’s top semiconductor companies to make chips on US soil The US plans to award more than US$6 billion to Samsung Electronics Co, helping the chipmaker expand beyond a project in Texas it has already announced, people familiar with the matter said. The money from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act would be one of several major awards that the US Department of Commerce is expected to announce in the coming weeks, including a grant of more than US$5 billion to Samsung’s rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), people familiar with the plans said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of the official announcements. The federal funding for
HIGH DEMAND: The firm has strong capabilities of providing key components including liquid cooling technology needed for AI servers, chairman Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday revised its revenue outlook for this year to “significant” growth from a “neutral” view forecast five months ago, due to strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers from cloud service providers. Hon Hai, a major assembler of iPhones that is also known as Foxconn, expects AI server revenues to soar more than 40 percent annually this year, chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) told investors. The robust growth would uplift revenue contribution from AI servers to 40 percent of the company’s overall server revenue this year, from 30 percent last year, Liu said. In the three-year period
LONG HAUL: Largan Energy Materials’ TNO-based lithium-ion batteries are expected to charge in five minutes and last about 20 years, far surpassing conventional technology Largan Precision Co (大立光) has formed a joint venture with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) to produce fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, mobile electronics and electric storage units, the camera lens supplier for Apple Inc’s iPhones said yesterday. Largan Energy Materials Co (萬溢能源材料), established in January, is developing high-energy, fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries using titanium niobium oxide (TNO) anodes, it said. TNO-based batteries can be fully charged in five minutes and have a lifespan of 20 years, a major advantage over the two to four hours of charging time needed for conventional graphite-anode-based batteries, Largan said in a
Taiwan is one of the first countries to benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, but because that is largely down to a single company it also represents a risk, former Google Taiwan managing director Chien Lee-feng (簡立峰) said at an AI forum in Taipei yesterday. Speaking at the forum on how generative AI can generate possibilities for all walks of life, Chien said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) — currently among the world’s 10 most-valuable companies due to continued optimism about AI — ensures Taiwan is one of the economies to benefit most from AI. “This is because AI is