Win Semiconductors Corp (穩懋半導體) yesterday reported the highest revenue in the past 12 months for last month due to bullish demand from branded handset vendors ahead of new product launches this quarter and next quarter.
The Linkou (林口), Taoyuan County-based company said in a statement that revenue was NT$1.04 billion (US$34.5 million) last month on a consolidated basis, up 7.41 percent from the previous month, and also up 23.45 percent from a year earlier.
Win Semiconductors, the world’s largest pure-play gallium arsenide (GaAs) foundry, provides foundry services for GaAs components used in handsets, including smartphones. Its major clients — Singapore’s Avago Technologies Ltd, Japan’s Murata Manufacturing Co, China’s RDA Microelectronics Inc (銳迪科) and US-based Skyworks Solutions Inc — produce GaAs-based electronic devices used by Apple Inc, Samsung Electronics Co and Nokia Oyj in their products.
Last month, power amplifier (PA) chips accounted for more than 50 percent of its total sales, with others including Wi-Fi-linked components and infrastructure-related applications, such as those for base stations, optical fiber networks, satellite communications and national defense businesses.
Win Semiconductors’ latest sales data came after its local peers — Visual Photonics Epitaxy Co (全新光電) and Advanced Wireless Semiconductor Co (宏捷科技) — last week also reported strong sales for last month.
Last month, Visual Photonics, one of the top three GaAs epitaxial wafer manufacturers in the world, posted NT$218 million in consolidated sales, the highest level since July last year. The figure rose 5.3 percent from July and was 30.45 percent higher than in August last year.
In the same month, Advanced Wireless Semiconductor registered NT$275 million in consolidated sales, up 4.4 percent month-on-month and 221 percent year-on-year.
Win Semiconductors, Visual Photonics and Advanced Wireless Semiconductor have been dubbed among major “Apple concept stocks” in the local market and are expected to report strong sales this quarter, considering the launch of the iPhone 6 as well as demand for PA chips for non-Apple handsets and other Wi-Fi-linked components, analysts say.
In the first eight months of the year, Win Semiconductors reported cumulative sales of NT$6.13 billion, down 22.97 percent from a year earlier, with the declining pace slower than the 28.44 percent registered in the first seven months.
From January through last month, Visual Photonics’ cumulative sales were NT$1.33 billion, representing an annual fall of 16.1 percent, but also improving from the 21.65 percent decline seen in the first seven months, while Advanced Wireless Semiconductor’s sales during the same period increased 72.53 percent year-on-year to NT$1.33 billion.
However, Taiwan’s GaAs industry still faces potential challenges in the long term, such as price competition from complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor PA products, analysts say.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS