E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技) yesterday said it lost NT$603 million (US$19.96 million) last quarter due to seasonally weak demand.
The firm, which supplies e-paper displays for Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle e-reader series, was in the red in the first three quarters last year, but made net income of NT$1.01 billion in the fourth quarter.
Last quarter’s losses widened from losses of NT$490 million in the first quarter of last year.
The world’s biggest e-paper display supplier reported NT$2.96 billion in revenue last quarter, almost half that of the previous quarter.
“The numbers were not great,” Yuanta Investment Consulting (元大投顧) analyst George Chang (張家麒) said in a research note.
He had forecast that E Ink would lose NT$516 million last quarter.
E Ink posted an operating loss of NT$1.21 billion for last quarter, which also exceeded Chang’s estimate of NT$760 million.
As the company is likely to take some extra reserves in its ongoing restructuring, E Ink may break even or significantly shrink its operating loss in the near future, Chang said.
Separately, touchpanel maker Young Fast Optoelectronics Co (洋華光電), which counts Samsung Electronics Co as its top client, posted an improved quarterly loss of NT$212 million for last quarter from a quarter ago.
Young Fast lost NT$1.31 billion in the fourth quarter last year.
It said in March that prices would stabilize this quarter after a 20 percent annual decline last year.
The company made a net profit of NT$177 million in the first three months of last year.
On Wednesday, rival Wintek Corp (勝華) reported narrowed quarterly losses of NT$1.5 billion, compared with losses of NT$3.83 billion in the fourth quarter.
That marked the eighth straight quarterly losses for Wintek.
Losses widened from the NT$840 million loss posted in the first quarter of last year. Wintek has said it expects operations to improve significantly in the second half of this year from the seasonally slow first half.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS