Catcher Technology Co (可成) on Sunday reported record high sales for the past quarter thanks to higher shipments of smartphone and notebook computer casings.
Sales were NT$13.31 billion (US$444.3 million) last quarter, up 27.9 percent from the previous quarter and 27.36 percent from the previous year, representing the highest level in Catcher’s 30-year history.
Last quarter’s results beat the company’s estimate of 15 percent sequential growth and analysts’ consensus forecast of an increase of between 20 and 25 percent.
Cumulative sales during the first half of the year increased 20.5 percent to NT$23.73 billion over the same period last year, also exceeding Catcher’s own expectations of 10-percent growth, the company said.
“We remain optimistic about our business outlook and forecast that sales will continue to grow sequentially through to the end of the year on strong market demand,” Catcher spokesman and chief financial officer James Wu (巫俊毅) said by telephone.
Wu said Catcher’s sales last quarter were driven mainly by shipments of casings used in smartphones and notebook computers.
While Catcher has been supplying metal casings for Apple Inc’s iPhone 5s products since the fourth quarter of last year, the Greater Tainan-based company did not ship any new type of casing for the rumored iPhone 6 last quarter, Wu said.
Catcher counts Apple, Sony Corp, HTC Corp (宏達電) and Nokia Oyj as its major clients.
The company also supplies metal casings for Apple’s iPads and MacBooks, while Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc also purchase casings from Catcher for their commercial laptop models, Wu said.
To complete new orders from Apple, Catcher has spent NT$10.7 billion on new equipment this year.
In April, chairman Allen Hung (洪水樹) told an investors’ conference that Catcher’s annual sales would grow at a double-digit rate this year from NT$43.24 billion last year.
Wu declined to comment on whether Apple’s new orders include orders for tablet-specific casings, but said smartphone casings would account for nearly 40 percent of the company’s total revenue this year.
That is up from about 35 percent in the past few years, and for the first time ever, is more than contributions from the company’s notebook casing business, he added.
Catcher shares soared 3.47 percent to NT$283.5 in Taipei trading yesterday, higher than the TAIEX’s 0.11 percent increase.
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