Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday posted its best monthly revenue in four months for last month, helping the DRAM chipmaker eke out some sequential growth last quarter.
Revenue expanded 5.56 percent to NT$3.56 billion (US$105.79 million) last month, compared with NT$3.37 billion in November last year, a company statement said.
On an annual basis, revenue shrank 14.42 percent as weaker-than-expected PC demand amid slowing economic growth in emerging nations has caused a supply glut, which weighed on chip prices.
In the quarter ending Dec. 31 last year, revenue stood at NT$10.347 billion, up slightly from NT$10.337 billion in the third quarter, ending three quarters of decline.
Last quarter’s revenue beat Morgan Stanley’s forecast of NT$9.35 billion. Morgan Stanley upgraded Nanya Technology to an “overweight” rating last month on expectations that the chipmaker would benefit from potential disposal gain of NT$23 billion from selling its stake of Inotera Memories Inc (華亞科技) to Micron Technology Inc.
Micron Technology offered to buy a 67 percent stake in Inotera at NT$30 per share from its investors. Nanya Technology and its parent company Formosa Group (台塑集團) hold about a 32 percent stake in Inotera.
Nanya Technology in October last year said that it expects seasonal demand and stabilizing DRAM chip prices to help hold gross margin steady at 37.3 percent, which it recorded in the third quarter of last year.
The company expects shipments to grow by a single digit last quarter from the previous quarter through converting more wafers to cost-efficient 30-nanometer (nm) design shrink technology.
Last year as a whole, revenue contracted 10.67 percent to NT$43.87 billion from NT$49.11 billion in 2014.
Nanya Technology’s latest fundraising program made further progress yesterday as Mercuries Life Insurance Co Ltd (三商美邦人壽) said it has subscribed to 13.85 million new common shares of Nanya Technology for NT$505 million.
The memory chipmaker plans to raise NT$11.68 billion by issuing 320 million shares at NT$36.5 each to help fund its technology migration to next-generation 20nm technology.
Kingston Technology Co of the US, the world’s largest independent memory module maker, yesterday subscribed to 82.19 million common shares of Nanya Technology for nearly NT$3 billion.
Kingston would hold about a 3 percent stake in Nanya after the transaction.
Meanwhile, another memory module maker, ADATA Technology Co (威剛), subscribed to 24.8 million shares for about NT$905 million.
Kingston and ADATA are both clients of Nanya Technology.
In a separate statement, Inotera, a 33-percent owned DRAM manufacturing arm of Micron Technology Inc, yesterday said revenue last month jumped 8.4 percent sequentially to an estimated NT$3.8 billion, compared with NT$3.508 billion in November last year.
That represented an annual decline of 45 percent from NT$6.92 billion.
AI SPLURGE: The four major US tech companies have lost more than US$950 billion in value since releasing earnings and outlooks, while equipment makers were gaining Four of the biggest US technology companies together have forecast capital expenditures that would reach about US$650 billion this year — a flood of cash earmarked for new data centers and all the gear within them. The spending planned by Alphabet Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc and Microsoft Corp, all in pursuit of dominance in the still-nascent market for artificial intelligence (AI) tools, is a boom without a parallel this century. Each of the companies’ estimates for this year is expected either near or surpass their budgets for the past three years combined. They would set a high-watermark for capital spending
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
COLLABORATION: Taiwan and the US could jointly find solutions to weaknesses in supply chain resilience for critical materials, focusing on mining and initial refinement Taiwan is likely to purchase rare earths from the US in the future, and is also in talks with Australia and Canada to strengthen global rare earth supply chain security, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday. Taiwan and the US last month concluded the sixth Economic Prosperity Partnership Dialogue, during which both sides signed a joint statement endorsing the principles of the Pax Silica Declaration, pledging to deepen cooperation in areas including critical minerals. At the time, Kung said the two sides would establish working groups to advance cooperation in areas including artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, critical materials and
RSS