Everest Textile Co (宏遠興業), which makes fabrics and garments, yesterday said two new plants in Ethiopia and the US are scheduled to start operations in the first half of this year.
The plant in Ethiopia is to manufacture garments for the company’s brand name customers from Europe, while the US facility is to supply knitted fabrics and garments to customers in the US, the firm said.
The two new factories are expected to increase the sales contribution from garments, which currently generate less than 2 percent of the company’s total sales, an Everest official said by telephone.
Revenue from woven and knitted fabrics accounts for more than 80 percent of the company’s total sales, while textured yarns generate nearly 10 percent, company data showed.
The official, who declined to be named, said the company plans to build another plant in Haiti because of lower labor costs.
“We have to keep seeking overseas sites for new factories, as the fabric manufacturing process is quite labor-intensive,” he told the Taipei Times.
Everest operates three plants in Taiwan, China and Thailand.
Everest’s local peers, including Lealea Enterprise Co (力麗) and Eclat Textile Co (儒鴻), also plan to accelerate overseas capacity expansion plans this year.
Lealea, which mainly produces textured polyester yarn, has approved a plan to invest as much as US$50 million in its first overseas factory in Indonesia.
The new plant is scheduled to begin operations in the first half of this year, with a target capacity of 4 million yards of polyester yarn per year, Lealea spokesman Chen Han-ching (陳漢卿) said by telephone yesterday.
The plant is to distribute about half of its products to customers in Indonesia, a nation of 255 million people, Chen said.
Lealea is also considering building another plant in Vietnam because of lower tariffs on exports to the EU, he added.
Local media reported that Eclat plans to expand production capacity in Vietnam after dissolving its wholly owned clothing plants in China last month.
Two new plants in Vietnam are scheduled to begin operations in the first and third quarters of this year respectively, and are expected to manufacture about 950,000 articles of clothing per month, boosting Eclat’s capacity by 20 percent annually, local media reported.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) forecast that its wafer shipments this quarter would grow up to 7 percent sequentially and the factory utilization rate would rise to 75 percent, indicating that customers did not alter their ordering behavior due to the US President Donald Trump’s capricious US tariff policies. However, the uncertainty about US tariffs has weighed on the chipmaker’s business visibility for the second half of this year, UMC chief financial officer Liu Chi-tung (劉啟東) said at an online earnings conference yesterday. “Although the escalating trade tensions and global tariff policies have increased uncertainty in the semiconductor industry, we have not
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
RSS