Chailease Holding Co (中租控股), the nation’s top leasing services provider, aims to grow its revenue by at least 15 percent this year from last year, driven by stronger financing demand from customers in China and Taiwan amid sustained economic recovery, top executives said yesterday.
“We expect leasing operations to increase by 20 percent in China and 15 percent in both Taiwan and Thailand this year as the macroenvironment turns more favorable,” Chailease Holding spokesman Kevin Liao (廖英智) said on the sidelines of a press conference to showcase a corporate jet the company bought last year from Canadian aircraft maker Bombardier.
The business landscape may gain better visibility next quarter, as the Lunar New Year holidays somewhat disrupted earnings this month and last month, Liao said.
The Neihu, Taipei-based company posted NT$5.89 billion (US$194.49 million) in net income for last year, up 56 percent from the previous year, on the back of rapid business growth in the Greater China area, according to the company’s statistics.
The results mean a record-high NT$5.91 earnings per share, topping peers in the local capital leasing market.
Chailese has teamed up with Bombardier to tap the burgeoning demand for private and corporate jets in the Asia-Pacific region, Chailease Group chairman Andre Koo (辜仲立) said.
The strategic alliance will allow the Canadian planemaker to broaden the availability of its aircraft in Southeast Asia, from being mainly limited to North America, and boost Chailease’s revenue, Koo said.
Bombardier regional vice president Nilesh Pattanayak forecast that the number of corporate jets in the region would spike from 500 at present to 5,000 in 20 years, as wealthy corporations and businesspeople increasingly desire fast and private transportation to meet their business and recreational needs.
Aircraft leasing bears higher interest rates compared with car leasing in Taiwan, where the interest spread falls between 3 percent and 4 percent, Chailese Financial said.
Shares in Chailese ended up 0.4 percent at NT$74.5 yesterday in Taipei trading, slightly stronger than the TAIEX that closed virtually unchanged, according to Taiwan Stock Exchange data.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to