SPORTSWEAR
Puma sales hit record-high
German sportswear maker Puma yesterday said it set a new quarterly record for sales between January and last month, springing over the 1 billion euro (US$1.09 billion) barrier and increasing its forecasts for the year. Revenues at the Bavaria-based group grew by 18 percent year-on-year to 1.01 billion euros in currency-adjusted terms, while operating, or underlying profit added 70.1 percent to reach 70.2 million euros. Puma said first-quarter net profit reached 49.6 million euros — almost double last year’s figure. Footwear sales grew 24.8 percent to reach 498.9 million euros, with more modest growth in its clothing and accessories segments.
CHIPMAKERS
SK Hynix’s Q1 profits surge
South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix made record quarterly profits in the first three months of the year, it said yesterday, with strong demand for memory chips for mobile gadgets pushing up prices. The firm’s first-quarter net profit surged 324 percent from a year ago to 1.89 trillion won (US$1.68 billion) while operating profit jumped 339 percent to 2.4 trillion won — also a record for any quarter. Strong demand for NAND flash memory chips used in smartphones and other mobile gadgets, coupled with industry-wide supply shortages, pushed up chip prices and boosted the firm’s margins, SK Hynix said. Prices for DRAM chips also rose, it said, adding demand would remain strong due to the popularity of cloud computing services and high-end PCs for gamers.
ENERGY
Amec loss exceeds estimates
British oil and natural gas services company Amec Foster Wheeler PLC, which is being bought by John Wood Group PLC, reported a bigger-than-expected last-year pretax loss as the oil market rout forced companies to delay or cancel contracts. The company’s loss before tax widened to £542 million (US$693.5 million), compared with a pretax loss of £235 million a year earlier. Analysts on average were expecting a full-year pretax loss of £275.5 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. The company reported a 15 percent fall in its full-year adjusted trading profit to £318 million for the whole of last year.
INVESTMENT
Rocket closes in on target
Rocket Internet SE increased sales and shrank losses at some of its biggest start-ups, bringing the company closer to a target of having three of its main investments break even by the end of this year. Food-box start-up HelloFresh boosted sales 49 percent to 158.7 million euros in the fourth quarter. Adjusted losses before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization narrowed at businesses including HelloFresh, Global Fashion Group and Dafiti, Rocket said yesterday.
AUTOMAKERS
Volvo’s earnings surge 58%
Volvo AB’s first-quarter earnings surged 58 percent as the auto and truckmaker reduced spending and sold more construction equipment. Adjusted operating profit jumped to 7.03 billion kronor (US$798.37 million) from 4.46 billion kronor a year earlier, the Gothenburg, Sweden-based company said yesterday in a statement. Volvo is navigating uneven demand for commercial vehicles in its key markets. While European truck orders have been buoyed by improved economic prospects, including German business confidence at a six-year high, demand in the US has flagged following a period of higher purchases.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts