SMARTPHONES
HTC sales plummet
Smartphone maker HTC Corp (宏達電) yesterday posted sales of NT$6.89 billion (US$210.3 million) for last month, down 52.62 percent from a year ago and 6.99 percent lower than the previous month, according to a company statement. Last month’s figure, the lowest in more than eight years, saw the company’s revenue for the first eight months drop 27.97 percent year-on-year to NT$88.83 billion, the statement showed. Earlier this week, HTC announced plans to lay off 600 employees in Taiwan as part of its plan to reduce its global workforce.
PANEL MAKERS
TPK revenue increases
TPK Holding Co (宸鴻), which supplies touchpanels for Apple Inc’s iPads and Apple Watches, yesterday said revenue increased 23.9 percent to NT$11.82 billion last month, compared with NT$10.54 billion in July, marking the highest level in eight months. Last month’s figure rose 12.08 percent from NT$10.54 billion in August last year. In the first eight months of the year, cumulative revenue declined 5.67 percent from a year earlier to NT$74.04 billion, the company said.
SOLAR POWER
Green Energy revenue rises
Green Energy Technology Inc (綠能科技), the nation’s biggest solar wafer maker, yesterday said revenue for last month rose 1.5 percent year-on-year and 8.7 percent month-on-month to NT$1.29 billion, the highest in seven months, as improving demand triggered prices to rise. Green Energy said in a statement that factory utilization reached more than 95 percent last month. The company expects prices to continue rising in the second half of this year, supported by strong demand for high-end solar wafers. From January to last month, revenue totaled NT$9.91 billion, up 2.8 percent from NT$9.65 billion in the same period of last year.
CAMERAS
Vivotek touts sales growth
Surveillance camera supplier Vivotek Inc (晶睿) yesterday said the company would regain sales growth momentum in the second half of the year, despite intensified pricing competition from Chinese peers. Vivotek chairman Owen Chen (陳文昌) said at an investors’ conference that shipments would exceed 400,000 units this year and the company would work to lower costs, develop more value-added products and adopt Internet of Things features to maintain its competitiveness. Net profit in the first half was NT$227.75 million, or NT$3.1 per share, compared with NT$163.49 million, or NT$2.22 per share, a year earlier. Total revenue in the first seven months reached NT$2.396 billion, up 5.51 percent from a year earlier.
PROJECTORS
Market sees Q2 growth
Taiwan’s projector market grew in the second quarter, with positive outlook for this quarter due to procurement orders from the education sector, research firm International Data Corp (IDC) said on Wednesday. The researcher’s latest data showed that domestic projector shipments in the April-to-June period totaled 23,700 units, up 11.6 percent from a year earlier and up 19.2 percent from the previous quarter. In terms of individual vendors, Epson Corp remained the market leader with a market share of 21 percent, followed by NEC Corp, BenQ Corp (明基), Optoma Corp (奧圖碼) and Vivitek Corp. The top five vendors accounted for a combined 70.4 percent of total projector shipments in the second quarter, IDC said.
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