Siliconware Precision Industries Co (SPIL, 矽品精密), the world’s No. 2 chip packager, yesterday posted the best first-quarter net profit in the company’s history, boding well for the year ahead.
SPIL expects the growth momentum to extend into this quarter, bucking the industry’s downtrend.
The company’s revenue is expected to grow to between NT$21.2 billion (US$691 million) and NT$22.4 billion this quarter, up by between 1.83 percent and 7.64 percent from last quarter’s NT$20.81 billion, chairman Bough Lin (林文伯) said.
The forecast is slightly better than the estimate of NT$22.06 billion by JPMorgan analyst Gokul Hariharan.
Lin also expects sequential growth in the third quarter based on the company’s track record.
Building on that optimism, SPIL plans to keep its capital spending budget at NT$14.5 billion, Lin said.
Semiconductor heavyweights Intel Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) earlier this month trimmed their capital spending for the year, saying they expect weaker demand to reduce revenue this quarter.
“Market demand in the communications [segment] will go up in the second quarter and PC demand will go up slightly, driven by gaming PCs. Consumer electronics will also rise slightly, while the memory sector will go down,” Lin said.
Gross margin would grow to between 26.5 percent and 28.5 percent from last quarter’s 26.2 percent, Lin said.
Operating profit margin would also rise to as high as 18.5 percent from 16.7 percent during the same period, he said.
In the first quarter of this year, net income expanded 24.8 percent to NT$2.62 billion, compared with NT$2.09 billion in the same period last year.
Last quarter’s net profit was slightly below Hariharan’s estimates of NT$2.65 billion.
Hariharan downgraded his investment rating on SPIL to “underweight.”
Talking about its new system-in-packaging (SiP) business, Lin said he expected the business to contribute US$10 million in revenue per quarter from next quarter.
SPIL lags behind rival Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (ASE, 日月光半導體) in offering SiP services, which has become a growth driver for ASE, as it has Apple Inc as its top customer.
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since
purpose: Tesla’s CEO sought to meet senior Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of its ‘full self-driving’ software in China and approval to transfer data they had collected Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk arrived in Beijing yesterday on an unannounced visit, where he is expected to meet senior officials to discuss the rollout of "full self-driving" (FSD) software and permission to transfer data overseas, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Chinese state media reported that he met Premier Li Qiang (李強) in Beijing, during which Li told Musk that Tesla's development in China could be regarded as a successful example of US-China economic and trade cooperation. Musk confirmed his meeting with the premier yesterday with a post on social media platform X. "Honored to meet with Premier Li