Lextar Corp’s (隆達) revenue this year is expected to expand from last year, driven by its LED lighting applications and sales contribution from new businesses, chairman David Su (蘇峰正) said yesterday.
“We expect Lextar’s LED lighting business to grow, while the backlight units are likely to be flattish from last year,” Su told reporters on the sidelines of the Taiwan International Lighting Show at Nangang Exhibition Hall in Taipei.
Su refused to give an exact annual growth estimate for the company’s revenue this year.
Lextar, an LED manufacturing arm of AU Optronics Corp (友達光電), has expanded its business through vertical integration in the industry. Its businesses include LED chipmaking, chip packaging services and lighting applications.
Su said Lextar’s LED lighting applications would continue to be the company’s main growth driver this year.
However, due to a low average selling price of LED lighting products on the market, the scale of revenue growth from this segment would be smaller than the size of its shipment growth, he said.
The company foresees revenue contribution from the LED lighting segment to reach between 40 percent and 45 percent this year from last year’s sales contribution of 40 percent, Su said.
As for backlight units, Su said the company’s strategy is to offer more price-competitive and higher-performance products to clients to gain a bigger market share amid a flattish global LED backlight market.
“The competition is tough, but the order outlook for backlight units for us this year is not bad,” Su said.
The company’s goal for the backlight segment, which accounted for 50 percent of the firm’s total revenue, is to maintain the revenue scale this year from last year, Su said.
To raise Lextar’s competitiveness in the industry, the company has been investing in high-end automotive LED lighting and high-end infrared applications for industrial and surveillance use in the past two years, Su said, adding that some Chinese clients have started to test Lextar’s newly designed LED headlight products used in high-speed trains and automobiles.
If the testing goes smoothly, Lextar is to start taking orders later this year to manufacture the new automotive headlights for clients in China and other Asian nations, he said.
Su said Lextar would begin to see a small scale revenue contribution from the new businesses this year, and the firm expects the segment to account for double-digit percentage sales contribution by 2019.
Lextar shares yesterday climbed 0.95 percent to close at NT$15.9 in Tiapei trading, underperforming the TAIEX, which gained 1.42 percent.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six