LED chipmaker Epistar Corp (晶元光電) yesterday reported record-high sales for last month and last quarter on the back of rising LED lighting penetration and growing demand for LCD TVs.
With sales of NT$2.36 billion (US$78.39 million) last month, first-quarter sales reached NT$6.24 billion, up 2.3 percent quarter-on-quarter and 44.33 percent year-on-year.
“Epistar’s sales performance shows the LED market is no longer gloomy, even in the slow season last quarter,” Fubon Securities Investment Services Co (富邦投顧) analyst Lewis Liu (劉立中) said by telephone.
Liu forecast Epistar’s sales would keep rising to NT$2.5 billion this month and next month.
“While Epistar is expected to sustain its robust sales momentum in the upcoming months, the company’s main sales driver would be chips used in LED lighting products, rather than backlight applications,” he said.
Liu said the global LED lighting market’s growth driver this year would be LED bulbs. As average selling price of LED bulbs fell to US$15.1 in February and the price is likely to keep falling, market demand will increase, especially in emerging markets such as China, he said.
Furthermore, as the US and the EU have banned the sale of incandescent bulbs, consumers will soon replace their light bulbs with LED bulbs, he added.
On Monday, Lextar Electronics Corp (隆達電子), said sales increased 27.42 percent month-on-month and 3.22 percent year-on-year to NT$1.12 billion last month, with first-quarter sales expanding 12.39 percent to NT$3.22 billion from a year earlier on higher demand of its LED lighting and backlight products.
Lextar manufactures layered crystalline wafers and chips used in LED products. Based in Hsinchu, the company also supplies LED backlight modules and provides packaging services to clients.
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
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