Hiroca Holdings Ltd (廣華控股), a Taiwanese automobile components maker with operations in China, yesterday said its new plant in Mexico is to start mass production in the fourth quarter this year as it seeks more orders from the US.
“The new facility is expected to generate revenue of more than US$16 million next year,” company president Steve Huang (黃建中) told reporters after an annual shareholders’ meeting in Taipei.
The ongoing capacity expansion project is seen as a part of Hiroca’s long-term business plans to reduce its reliance on its major Japanese brand-name customers, Huang said.
Revenue from Japanese clients — including Toyota, Honda, and Nissan — accounted for 63.8 percent of the Taiwanese firm’s total sales last year, company data showed.
“We aim to lower the revenue contribution from Japanese customers to less than 60 percent over the next three years,” Huang told the Taipei Times.
Meanwhile, the company said it is to provide products for NextEV (蔚來汽車), a Shanghai-based electric-car maker, in a bid to tap business opportunities in China’s growing “new energy” vehicle market.
Given the increasing penetration of electric cars worldwide, Hiroca needs to reach out to more overseas customers to stay competitive, it said.
The company plans to allocate nearly 150 million yuan (US$21.9 million) for capital expenditure this year, up from last year’s 120 million yuan, Hiroca chief financial officer Sheng-chang Huang (黃盛昌) said.
Hiroca has been allocating research and development resources on a three-dimensional overlay method, the latest wrapping technique, which is done in a vacuum, the company said.
Shareholders of Hiroca yesterday approved the distribution of a cash dividend of NT$4 per share from last year’s net profit of NT$685.3 million (US$22.8 million), or earnings per share of NT$8.17.
With the company’s stock price closing at NT$104 in Taipei trading yesterday, the payout translated into a yield of 3.85 percent, market data showed.
For the whole of last year, the company achieved accumulative sales of NT$7.74 billion, a 7.7 percent decrease from NT$8.39 billion the previous year, data showed.
The firm attributed the weak showing to the sharp appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar against the yuan.
However, gross margin over the period advanced from 23.89 percent to 27.41 percent, aided by improved manufacturing processes, Hiroca said.
Founded in Dongguan in Guangdong Province, China, in 1999, the company offers a wide range of products for global automobile manufacturers.
Its products include injection-molded parts for auto interiors, water-transfer printing and surface coating.
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