Casetek Holdings Ltd (鎧勝), a metal casing supplier for Apple Inc’s iPads and MacBooks, yesterday reported a 50 percent annual decline in net profit to NT$1.08 billion (US$34.36 million) for last quarter, dragged down by falling global demand for tablets.
This brought the company’s cumulative net profit to NT$2.8 billion, or NT$8.26 per share, half of the NT$5.63 billion, or NT$16.59 per share, it made in the previous year, the company’s data showed.
“The declining global demand for tablets and a client’s delayed launch of its new notebook computers affected Casetek’s performance on both revenues and profit last year,” chief financial officer Jonathan Chang (張昭平) told an investors conference at the company’s headquarters in Taipei.
Casetek, which is a subsidiary of iPhone assembler Pegatron Corp (和碩), saw its gross margin fall by 6.2 percentage points to 19.3 percent last year, while its operating margin contracted by 6.4 percentage points annually to 10.2 percent, the data showed.
Casetek chairman Jason Cheng (程建中), who doubles as Pegatron’s vice chairman, said the casing company’s performance last year was “below industry levels,” but he plans to maintain a similar dividend policy and payout ratio to last year’s 48.2 percent.
That would translate into a cash dividend of NT$3.98 based on the firm’s earnings per share of NT$8.26 last year, compared with the cash dividend of NT$8 a year ago.
The proposal is pending the board of directors’ approval.
Citing the company’s revenue pattern, Cheng said the company estimates that revenue this quarter could fall as much as 30 percent from last quarter’s NT$10.29 billion due to the beginning of an annual slow season for consumer electronics products.
In an effort to improve the company’s profitability this year, Cheng said Casetek will only take orders that have higher margins and average selling prices.
Cheng said Casetek is stepping up measures to increase the number of its clients and products to offset the effects of the declining tablet industry, efforts he said will pay off in the second half of this year.
The company has secured orders from four smartphone clients and will gradually begin shipments from the end of next quarter, Cheng added.
The clients include one of the top five Chinese smartphone vendors that sells “tens of millions” of handsets per year, according to Casetek chief executive officer Gary Chuang (莊育志).
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