Garment manufacturer Quang Viet Enterprise Co (廣越) yesterday said it plans to acquire a nearly 51 percent share in a Romania-based plant to satisfy orders from European luxury brands, company president Charles Wu (吳朝筆) told an investors’ conference in Taipei.
The company is a down jacket supplier for global sportswear and functional clothing brands, including Adidas, North Face and Patagonia. It also produces for luxury brands, including Prada.
The new factory is seen as a milestone in Quang Viet’s expansion in Europe, as Romania is a major apparel production base in the region.
“We are still discussing terms and other details of a possible acquisition, but we are optimistic about the results,” Wu said, without giving an exact timetable.
Quang Viet operates three plants in Vietnam and two in China, with a total capacity of 850,000 units of clothing per month, company data showed.
Wu said the company plans to add 30 production lines to its two plants in Vietnam next year.
Analysts at Daiwa Capital Markets Inc and Credit Suisse Group AG said the company aims to expand its capacity by 10 percent each year in the next three years, mainly in Vietnam.
Wu did not elaborate on capacity expansion plans for factories in China, where the company is close to a steady source of raw materials, such as down and feather.
From January through September, the company’s net profit plunged from NT$880 million to NT$687 million (US$27.96 million to US$21.8 million). The company attributed the declines mainly to NT$20 million of foreign-exchange losses in the period.
Soaring labor costs in Vietnam and declining orders from one of its major clients also dragged down its profitability in the first nine months of the year, Quang Viet said in a financial statement yesterday.
Gross margin in the first nine months of the year shrank from 20.4 percent to 18.9 percent over the same period and revenue decreased 4 percent to NT$7.39 billion year-on-year, company data showed.
Despite losses in the first nine months of the year, Wu said that he is upbeat about the company’s business outlook in the coming quarters because of robust demand for its high-end down jackets.
Wu said the company has been Gore-tex certified, which would help stimulate orders of related products.
“Sales are expected to grow 10 percent next year,” he said, adding that the company is expecting to add three brand-name customers next year.
The company is also considering tapping into knitted fabric garment production to drive next year’s revenue, he said.
Quang Viet shares dropped 1.36 percent to close at NT$145 in Taipei trading yesterday, while the benchmark TAIEX rose 0.01 percent to 9,068.15 points.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by