OPTICS
Largan revenue grows 5.7%
Largan Precision Co (大立光), the main camera lens supplier for Apple Inc’s iPhones, yesterday reported revenue of NT$4.82 billion (US$152.99 million) for last month, its highest monthly figure in the past nine months. Revenue grew 5.7 percent from the previous month’s NT$4.56 billion, but fell 9 percent from last year’s NT$5.3 billion, the firm said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. By shipment breakdown, the company’s lenses with 10 megapixels or more accounted for between 60 and 70 percent of its total shipments last month, while the 8-megapixel products contributed between 20 and 30 percent, the firm said. Citing order visibility, Largan said it foresees this month’s revenue continuing to expand from last month.
CASINGS
Catcher revenue drops 2.6%
Catcher Technology Co (可成科技), a metal casing supplier for Apple Inc’s iPhones, yesterday reported revenue of NT$7 billion for last month, dropping 2.6 percent from last year’s NT$7.18 billion. The result expanded as much as 16.8 percent from the previous month’s NT$5.99 billion, the company said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Last month’s revenue marked the company’s highest monthly performance in the past nine months, according to the firm’s data. Catcher attributed robust growth to scheduled shipments of products for clients’ new projects. In the first eight months of this year, Catcher’s revenue contracted 7 percent to NT$47.36 billion. The casing supplier said that it expects its annual revenue to remain flat or grow mildly from last year’s NT$82.41 billion.
ELECTRONICS
Citizenship report ‘untrue’
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) yesterday released a statement through his lawyers saying that he did not apply to become a citizen of Singapore, nor did he have Singaporean citizenship. The statement was in response to a report published by the Chinese-language online media group Credere Media (信傳媒), which said Gou applied to become a Singaporean citizen after the firm’s annual general meeting in June in a bid to evade paying tax in Taiwan. Gou’s statement said the report is groundless and untrue.
FOREIGN EXCHANGE
Reserves rise US$1.78bn
The nation’s foreign exchange reserves totaled US$435.86 billion as of the end of last month, increasing US$1.78 billion from the end of the previous month, the central bank said yesterday. The central bank attributed the increase to a successful management strategy and the appreciation of the euro and other reserve currencies against the US dollar. The market value of securities investments and local currency deposits held by foreign portfolio managers reached US$308.7 billion, or 71 percent of foreign exchange reserves, the central bank said.
ELECTRONICS
LCD patent deal inked
E Ink Holdings Co (元太科技), which supplies e-paper displays for Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle series, yesterday said its South Korean subsidiary Hydis Technologies Co has penned an agreement with Chinese flat-panel maker Tianma Micro-electronics Co (天馬微電子) to license patents linked to LCD manufacturing. The agreement will have a positive impact on E Ink’s finances and business, the company said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. E Ink charges royalty fees by licensing Hydis Technologies’ high-resolution fringe-field-switching LCD technology.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained