TPK Holding Co (TPK, 宸鴻), which supplies touch panels for Apple Inc’s Apple Watches and iPads, yesterday posted quarterly losses of NT$618 million (US$19.6 million) for last quarter due to seasonally weak demand, an inventory glut, and customers’ product transitions.
TPK lost NT$1.01 billion in the first quarter. Gross margin fell to 2.1 percent last quarter from 6.5 percent in the second quarter because of a decline in factory utilization, the company said.
TPK said it expected business to pick up this quarter.
TPK chief executive officer Michael Chung (鍾依華) said the company is optimistic about demand for touch sensors, applications for the company’s open-cell touch display solution, fingerprint sensors, curved displays and new devices running on Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 10.
“We believe that pressure sensors [for force touchpanels] will see widespread adoption across the mobile-device market this year,” Chung said.
TPK’s revenue this quarter is expected to grow by 50 percent from last quarter’s NT$23.7 billion, Chung said, adding that gross margin is set to improve to between 2 percent and 6 percent.
TPK is scheduled to begin shipping pressure sensors in the second half and expects the volume to grow significantly next year.
TPK’s forecast of strong growth this quarter contrasts with the outlook for the touchpanel industry as a whole, which Chung expects to remain stagnant due to a lack of game-changing apps and products in the mobile-device market.
TPK said the company’s operating costs shrank to NT$1.62 billion last quarter from the NT$1.81 billion in the first quarter due to organizational restructuring.
Referring to the high expectations for a certain smart watch, Chung said that the wearable device market is still in its infancy in terms of ecosystem and applications, but he is optimistic on the growth potential of the segment, adding that the first-generation iPhone also had a slow start.
Chung said that apart from telling the time and fitness applications such as heart rate monitoring, uses for smart watches might expand to unlocking electronic doors, payment processing and personal security monitoring for children and the disabled.
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
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
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],”