BEVERAGES
Crown & Fancy sells stake
Crown & Fancy Coffee House (金鑛咖啡) yesterday said it had sold another 40 percent stake to major shareholder Star Travel Corp (燦星旅遊), increasing Star Travel’s holdings to 80 percent. The coffee chain, which started out as a street vendor in Kaohsiung in 2000, said it had reached the share sale agreement with Star Travel’s parent company, Tsann Kuen Group (燦坤實業), on Wednesday. The company said it hopes the alliance with the nation’s largest home appliance and consumer electronics chain will help speed up its coffee franchise development in Taiwan and abroad. Crown & Fancy said it plans to increase its number of stores from 27 to 51 by the end of this year. Star Travel chairman Ray Yang (楊文芳) is to serve as the new chairman of Crown & Fancy, replacing Cheng Li-chien (鄭立鍵).
NETWORKING
Accton posts record revenue
Accton Technology Corp (智邦科技), a local maker of computer network equipment such as routers, yesterday reported its revenue last month hit an all-time high. Consolidated revenue grew 10.86 percent year-on-year and 8.98 percent month-on-month to NT$2.76 billion (US$82.39 million) last month, the company said in a statement. By product, network switches accounted for 67.28 percent of the company’s sales last month, carrier access solutions made up 16.7 percent, wireless local area network products 7.28 percent, broadband and gateway devices 2.3 percent and other devices 6.44 percent. The strong performance last month helped boost the company’s cumulative revenue for the whole of last year by 8.28 percent to NT$24.74 billion, the company said.
TRAVEL
Lion Travel sees sales rise
Lion Travel Service Co Ltd (雄獅旅行社), the nation’s largest outbound travel service company, yesterday said that sales for last quarter rose 12.84 percent from a year earlier to NT$4.71 billion, although the figure was 23.19 percent lower than the previous quarter due to seasonal factors. For the whole of last year, the company said it managed to generate record revenue of NT$21.01 billion, up by 18.74 percent year-on-year.
CONSTRUCTION
Highwealth sales skyrocket
Highwealth Construction Co (興富發), which last year focused on first-time and salaried home buyers, yesterday said consolidated sales surged last month because of contributions from new property projects in Taipei, Tainan and Kaohsiung. Sales reached NT$13.59 billion last month, up 160.21 percent year-on-year and 176.56 percent month-on-month, according to the company’s filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. However, total sales for all of last year decreased 7.55 percent to NT$34.68 billion from 2014, as the industry was affected by a cooling housing market in Taiwan.
ENTERTAINMENT
Gamania posts record sales
Online game publisher Gamania Digital Entertainment Co (遊戲橘子) yesterday reported its highest-ever annual sales, with last year’s figure totaling NT$9.71 billion, a 6.7 percent increase from 2014. Gamania, the local distributor of NCSoft Corp’s Lineage series of online fantasy games, attributed the increases to the launches of several mobile and PC games, as well as contributions from its e-commerce subsidiary, Jollywiz Digital Technology Co Ltd (樂利數位), and on-demand content streaming subsidiary, Coture (酷瞧). Meanwhile, online game publisher X-Legend Entertainment Co (傳奇網路) yesterday reported annual sales of NT$1.24 billion for last year, a decrease of 15.92 percent from the previous year.
WASHINGTON’S INCENTIVES: The CHIPS Act set aside US$39 billion in direct grants to persuade the world’s top semiconductor companies to make chips on US soil The US plans to award more than US$6 billion to Samsung Electronics Co, helping the chipmaker expand beyond a project in Texas it has already announced, people familiar with the matter said. The money from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act would be one of several major awards that the US Department of Commerce is expected to announce in the coming weeks, including a grant of more than US$5 billion to Samsung’s rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), people familiar with the plans said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of the official announcements. The federal funding for
HIGH DEMAND: The firm has strong capabilities of providing key components including liquid cooling technology needed for AI servers, chairman Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday revised its revenue outlook for this year to “significant” growth from a “neutral” view forecast five months ago, due to strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers from cloud service providers. Hon Hai, a major assembler of iPhones that is also known as Foxconn, expects AI server revenues to soar more than 40 percent annually this year, chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) told investors. The robust growth would uplift revenue contribution from AI servers to 40 percent of the company’s overall server revenue this year, from 30 percent last year, Liu said. In the three-year period
LONG HAUL: Largan Energy Materials’ TNO-based lithium-ion batteries are expected to charge in five minutes and last about 20 years, far surpassing conventional technology Largan Precision Co (大立光) has formed a joint venture with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) to produce fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, mobile electronics and electric storage units, the camera lens supplier for Apple Inc’s iPhones said yesterday. Largan Energy Materials Co (萬溢能源材料), established in January, is developing high-energy, fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries using titanium niobium oxide (TNO) anodes, it said. TNO-based batteries can be fully charged in five minutes and have a lifespan of 20 years, a major advantage over the two to four hours of charging time needed for conventional graphite-anode-based batteries, Largan said in a
Taiwan is one of the first countries to benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, but because that is largely down to a single company it also represents a risk, former Google Taiwan managing director Chien Lee-feng (簡立峰) said at an AI forum in Taipei yesterday. Speaking at the forum on how generative AI can generate possibilities for all walks of life, Chien said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) — currently among the world’s 10 most-valuable companies due to continued optimism about AI — ensures Taiwan is one of the economies to benefit most from AI. “This is because AI is