Catcher Technology Co (可成科技), which makes metal casings for Apple Inc’s MacBook Air notebooks and iPad Mini tablets, yesterday forecast a 20 percent sequential decline in revenue this quarter due to slow seasonal demand.
The forecast would see Catcher’s revenue drop to about NT$10.92 billion (US$359 million) for the quarter from NT$13.11 billion last quarter.
However, chief financial officer James Wu (巫俊毅) said he expected the company to regain momentum next quarter and report quarterly growth driven by customers’ new products.
This year as a whole “will be another good year for Catcher if the company can implement its capacity expansion plan as scheduled,” Catcher chairman Allen Hung (洪水樹) told investors during an earnings telephone call.
To meet customer demand, Catcher plans to expand its casing manufacturing capacity for bigger-screen smartphones and wearable devices, Hung said. He did not give details.
The expansion will help Catcher shift away from PCs, which are in low demand, Hung said.
“This year, Catcher’s product mix will be adjusted and will include more casings designed for smartphones and wearable devices, as we see nearly every client making efforts to win in the new [wearable device] battlefield,” Hung said.
At least half of clients’ wearable device products would be equipped with metal casings “because they look more stylish,” Hung said.
To boost capacity, the firm plans to spend more than last year’s NT$9.6 billion on new equipment this year.
Last quarter, strong demand for new tablets ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday helped boost Catcher’s net profit by 25.3 percent quarter-on-quarter to NT$3.47 billion.
On an annual basis, Catcher’s net profit fell 24.2 percent because of a high comparative base resulting from foreign exchange gains.
That brought Catcher’s net profit for last year to a record high of NT$13.8 billion, up 27.6 percent from the NT$10.81 billion it made in 2012, according to the company’s financial statement.
Currently, Catcher’s largest client is Apple, which contributes about 50 percent of Catcher’s total sales. The Tainan-based company also counts Sony Corp, Samsung Electronics Co, HTC Corp (宏達電), BlackBerry Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc as its major clients.
“The capacity expansion plan should be tailored for Apple,” Deutsche Bank analyst Birdy Lu (呂家霖) said by telephone, adding that Catcher is prepared to supply metal casings for Apple’s anticipated iPhone 6 later this year.
Citing an industry survey conducted by Deutsche Bank, Lu said Apple is set to launch only one iPhone model this year, adding that the product is expected to be equipped with a 4.7-inch display.
While “it’s almost for sure” that Catcher will be the exclusive casing supplier for HTC’s new flagship smartphone, “chances are that HTC’s new smartphones will not stimulate huge market demand and therefore not benefit Catcher much,” Lu said.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained