Shareholders of Formosa Plastics Corp (台塑企業), the nation’s largest producer of polyvinyl chloride, yesterday approved a plan to distribute 58.46 percent of its earnings per share (EPS) from last year and save the rest for capacity expansion needs.
The company is to pay a cash dividend of NT$1.9 to shareholders this year, based on last year’s EPS of NT$3.25, with the payout ratio to be the lowest in the company’s history.
“We apologize to our shareholders for distributing so little this year. It’s because we have many foreign investments to make,” company chairman Lee Chih-tsuen (李志村) said at this year’s annual general meeting.
“The interest rates overseas are high and it is difficult to obtain funds from foreign banks, making it more efficient for us to use our own money,” Lee said.
Normally, the company distributes most of its income generated the previous year to shareholders, a principle set by company founder Wang Yung-ching (王永慶), Lee said, adding that the company once paid 90 percent of its income to shareholders.
This year, the company has spent US$2 billion to increase the capacity of its US branch, Formosa Plastics Corp USA, which will allow the company to make an additional 1.2 million tonnes of ethylene, 600,000 more tonnes of propene and 400,000 more tonnes of high-density polyethylene each year, Lee said.
The company has also spent US$750 million to expand a factory in China’s Zhejiang Province to make an additional 160,000 to 200,000 tonnes of acrylate a year, 45,000 more tonnes of superabsorbent polymers and 75,000 more tonnes of ethylene-vinyl acetate, Lee added.
Even so, he said, the company’s operating profit in the first half of this year will be more than the NT$1.28 billion (US$42.6 million) of the previous year on the back of better global economic conditions.
However, Lee said it is not likely that Formosa Plastics Corp USA will report a higher profit this year than the US$1.33 billion it reported last year because of higher raw material costs. Formosa Plastics holds 22.59 percent of the US company’s shares.
Lee said the company is likely to post higher profit this year than NT$20.72 billion last year because it will book income of about NT$2.6 billion from sales of Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) shares.
As for Formosa Plastics Group’s (台塑集團) construction of a new giant steel mill in Vietnam, Lee said the Vietnamese government has to guarantee the safety of Chinese workers for them to return to work.
About 3,000 Chinese workers were evacuated by Beijing during violence in Vietnam after China deployed an oil rig near the Vietnamese coast.
If these workers cannot resume work within two months, the mill’s first furnace might not be operational by the end of next year, the group said.
The group chose to build the mill in Vietnam because there are few factories in the country, so it does not need to worry about how much carbon dioxide it produces, Lee said.
Formosa Plastics shares rose 0.26 percent to NT$76.7 yesterday, outperforming the TAIEX, which was down 0.09 percent.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS