Pegatron Corp (和碩), one of Apple Inc’s iPhone assemblers, yesterday said that its revenue would climb by between 5 and 10 percent annually this year supported by rising orders from its communication, consumer electronics and computing products.
“We are cautiously optimistic about Pegatron’s operations this year. The communications department is to introduce a product that has significant changes in details, which we believe it will not let consumers down,” Pegatron chief executive officer S.J. Liao (廖賜政) told an investors’ conference at the company’s headquarters in Taipei.
Pegatron’s communications department, which includes smartphone assembling and networking products, contributed 72 percent of overall revenue of NT$360.48 billion (US$11.64 billion) last quarter, company data showed.
The department’s largest client is Apple, which is expected to launch its next-generation iPhone this year to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the device’s launch.
Liao said rising demand for gaming PCs and new gaming consoles would support Pegatron’s computing and consumer electronics businesses this year.
The Pegatron board approved a capital expenditure plan of between US$400 million and US$450 million to significantly expand the company’s production capacity this year to meet customer demand, Pegatron chief financial officer Charles Lin (林秋炭) said.
The capital expenditure is at least double last year’s US$200 million.
Liao said in his outlook for the current quarter that revenue from the non-computing sector, which makes up 87 percent of the firm’s revenue, is to contract by between 35 percent and 40 percent quarter-on-quarter due to the slow season for communications and consumer electronics products.
Revenue will improve significantly in the second half of this year, when communications and consumer electronics clients launch new products, Liao said.
The remarks from the top executives came after the company posted net income of NT$19.34 billion, or NT$7.5 per share, for last year, down 18.7 percent from NT$23.81 billion, or NT$9.23 per share, the previous year.
It was Pegatron’s first annual decline in earnings since the company listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 2010, company data showed.
Gross margin dropped 0.8 percentage points to 5.4 percent last year, while operating margin fell 0.5 percentage points to 2.8 percent, the data showed.
Lin attributed the earnings decline to slowing demand last year.
Combined foreign-exchange losses of NT$4.37 billion also weighed on the earnings performance, he said.
The board approved the distribution of a cash dividend of NT$5 per share. The planned distribution translates into a payout ratio of 66.66 percent, higher than the previous year’s 54.5 percent.
That represents a yield of 6.03 percent based on the company’s closing price of NT$82.8 in Taipei trading yesterday.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
NATIONAL SECURITY: Intel’s testing of ACM tools despite US government control ‘highlights egregious gaps in US technology protection policies,’ a former official said Chipmaker Intel Corp has tested chipmaking tools this year from a toolmaker with deep roots in China and two overseas units that were targeted by US sanctions, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Intel, which fended off calls for its CEO’s resignation from US President Donald Trump in August over his alleged ties to China, got the tools from ACM Research Inc, a Fremont, California-based producer of chipmaking equipment. Two of ACM’s units, based in Shanghai and South Korea, were among a number of firms barred last year from receiving US technology over claims they have
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
RSS