Epistar Corp (晶元光電) shares yesterday rose by 4.86 percent as investors welcomed the company’s latest global LED chip patent cross-license agreement with US-based Cree Inc.
On Tuesday, the two LED companies said in a joint statement that they had inked a deal to strengthen their LED chip patent portfolio and support growth in the LED lighting and LED bulb markets.
Under the terms of the agreement, each party receives a license to the other’s nitride-based LED chip patents and is granted certain rights to some non-nitride LED chip patents, the companies said.
“This agreement underscores both companies’ commitment to accelerating the adoption of LED lighting, while respecting the value and importance of international intellectual property laws,” Cree chairman and CEO Chuck Swoboda said in the statement.
Epistar will also pay a licensing fee and royalties to Cree, but the two companies did not provide exact numbers.
No technology transfer between the parties was included in the agreement, they added.
Separately, Lextar Electronics Corp (隆達電子), which manufactures upstream LED chips and provides downstream packaging services, yesterday said that demand for information technology backlighting applications is weak this quarter.
While demand for TV backlighting products is expected to remain steady this quarter, pricing pressure for general lighting products is set to continue from last quarter, the company said in a media release.
Lextar released its financial results for last quarter, which showed that net income fell to NT$41 million (US$1.29 million) from NT$159.59 million in the first quarter.
Earnings per share were NT$0.07 last quarter, down from NT$0.26 in the first quarter, while gross margin shed 4.6 percentage points to 10.7 percent.
Total revenue from January to last month dropped 2.81 percent from the previous year to NT$8.19 billion, Lextar said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
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