CHIPMAKERS
Amazon chooses MediaTek
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s fifth-largest chip designer, yesterday said Amazon.com has adopted its cutting-edge single chips for its new Android Fire TV and Fire tablets. That deepens MediaTek’s partnership with Amazon, after the US company used MediaTek’s chips for its Fire tablet series, including the Fire HD 6, Fire HD 7 and Fire HD Kids Edition tablets. The statement came after MediaTek cut its shipments target for chips used in tablets by 10 percent this year to 45 million units, from the 50 million units it forecast earlier this year on slowing demand due to smartphone cannibalization and the weak global economy. Amazon’s Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 10 tablets are to be powered by MediaTek’s quadcore chip MT8135, while the Fire TV is to be powered by the MT8173, a 64-bit quad-core processor, and ARM Holdings PLC’s Cortex-A72 cores. Compared with weak demand for chips used in tablets and smartphones, MediaTek said demand for TVs is relatively stable this quarter.
CHIPMAKERS
GlobalWafers share price set
GlobalWafers Co Ltd (環球晶圓), the world’s sixth-largest wafer supplier, is set to offer its shares at NT$61.5 on its debt on the Taipei Stock Exchange, Yuanta Securities Corp (元大證券) said in a statement released yesterday. Yuanta Securities is an underwriter of GlobalWafers shares. Due to strong interest, GlobalWafers has raised its offering to 7.2 million shares from the 1.8 million shares originally planned, the brokerage said. Investors have a 5.72 percent chance of buying GlobalWafers shares, it estimated. GlobalWafers shares are scheduled to start trading on Friday. Local solar wafer maker Sino-America Silicon Products Inc (中美晶) owns 71 percent of GlobalWafers.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by