PANEL MAKERS
CPT reports lower revenue
Flat-panel display maker Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (CPT, 中華映管) yesterday said revenue shrank 8.9 percent to NT$4.49 billion (US$140 million) last month, from November’s NT$4.92 billion, as shipments fell. Shipments of panels for mobile devices and for cars dropped 8.3 percent to 38.37 million units last month, from 41.86 million units in November, the company said in a statement. Shipments of PC panels plunged 26.8 percent to 139,000 units from 190,000 units a month earlier, it added. Last year, revenue slid 3.9 percent to NT$56.39 billion from NT$58.66 billion in 2013, it said.
BATTERIES
Simplo posts quarterly gain
Simplo Technology Co (新普科技), the nation’s largest notebook battery pack maker, which supplies battery packs to Apple Inc, yesterday posted quarterly revenue of NT$19.01 billion for last quarter, up 10.45 percent from a year earlier and up 24.98 percent from the previous quarter. Simplo’s sales reached NT$17.21 billion in the fourth quarter of the previous year and made NT$15.21 billion in the previous quarter. The firm’s consolidated revenue for all of last year was NT$60.01 billion, up 9.65 percent from the previous year’s NT$54.73 billion, according to a company filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
CHIPMAKERS
Aspeed sales beat estimate
Aspeed Technology Inc (信驊), which designs chips for servers that support cloud computing technology, reported record-high sales for last month at NT$84.67 million, up 2.87 percent month-on-month and 67.53 percent year-on-year. The company’s third-quarter revenue totaled NT$237 million, which was 4 percent higher than Morgan Stanley’s estimate. Morgan Stanley analyst Charlie Chan (詹家鴻) yesterday attributed last quarter’s performance to higher demand for servers in the US and China. The company indicated that orders remained strong into this month, Chan said in a note.
AUTOMAKERS
New vehicle sales rise
Sales of new cars last year rose 12 percent to 423,829 units, the highest since 2005, when the figure was a record-high 514,000 units, statistics provided by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications showed on Monday. Last month alone, the number of new vehicles sold in the nation rose 7.2 percent year-on-year to 41,799 units, in line with market expectations, the data showed. Hotai Motor Co (和泰汽車), which sells Toyota and Lexus vehicles in Taiwan, continued to lead the market last year, distributing 139,241 cars, with a 33 percent market share. “Consumer confidence in December continued to recover to close to the prior peak, keeping us positive on the Taiwan auto market entering 2015, since domestic consumption remains resilient and car replacement is still ongoing,” Morgan Stanley analyst Terence Cheng said in a note.
FAST FOOD
McNuggets deal launched
The Taiwan branch of McDonald’s Corp launched a Chicken McNuggets offer on Monday. From now until Jan. 27, people who purchase set meals at McDonald’s can get four Chicken McNuggets for NT$39, the company said, adding the move was to sustain the product’s popularity among consumers. Local consumers eat about 200 million Chicken McNuggets a year, the company said, an amount that if stacked vertically would be the height of 4,000 Taipei 101 skyscrapers.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last