LCD panel makers are at risk of incurring deep losses this year as the rise of Chinese manufacturers aggravates already severe oversupply, IHS Technology said yesterday.
The global supply of LCD panels is expected to increase 6 percent annually this year, outpacing the 3 percent growth in demand, mostly on the back of Chinese panel manufacturers BOE Technology Group (京東方) and China Star Optoelectronics Technology Co (華星光電), the market researcher projected.
China’s global market share is expected to expand to 23.7 percent this year by capacity from last year’s 19.5 percent, stealing share from Taiwan, IHS Technology said.
Taiwanese firms would see their market share drop to 32.9 percent from 34.6 percent, the researcher said.
“We only see a brief rebound in panel prices in the second quarter and third quarter, primarily due to stock-building demand from major TV brands including Samsung Electronics Co and Chinese TV vendors,” IHS Technology senior director David Hsieh (謝勤益) said at an annual display forum.
Such demand would be short-term and might not be strong enough to end the existing supply glut, Hsieh said.
“Panel makers have to tighten their belts this year,” Hsieh said. “Most panel companies will remain in the red throughout the whole year.”
Shipments of LCD TVs are expected to remain flat compared with last year at 225 million units, IHS Technology forecast.
Local panel maker AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電) swung into quarterly losses of NT$8.18 billion in the fourth quarter of last year.
The company is expected to post narrower quarterly losses of NT$4.9 billion in the first quarter this year, CIMB said.
AUO is scheduled to release its latest financial results tomorrow.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts