Formosa Chemicals & Fibre Corp (台灣化學纖維), which produces aromatics and styrenics, yesterday said it is working to build a new ethylene plant in Louisiana in a bid to increase its presence in the US.
“The project is expected to pass the environmental impact assessment by the end of next year,” company vice chairman Hong Fu-yuan (洪福源) told reporters on the sidelines of the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Taipei.
The facility will be built in partnership with the company’s affiliate, Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化), in St James, Louisiana, and is expected to become operational in 2023, Formosa Chemicals said.
Formosa Chemicals and Formosa Petrochemical are both major units of Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), the nation’s largest industrial conglomerate.
The investment in Louisiana is expected to cost US$9.5 billion, Formosa Chemicals said.
The firm is also seeking investment opportunities in Texas in light of abundant reserves of shale oil there, company chairman William Wang (王文淵) said earlier this year.
Wang, a key member of the group’s founding Wang (王) family, was absent at yesterday’s meeting.
Formosa Chemicals said it plans to spend about NT$800 million (US$26.57 million) on research and development this year.
Hong said he is optimistic about the company’s business outlook for the rest of this year, adding that it will benefit from a continued recovery in the US and robust infrastructure demand bolstered by China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative.
In the first five months of this year, the company saw revenue rise 10.58 percent from NT$129.8 billion a year earlier to NT$143.5 billion on the back of improved market sentiment.
In the first quarter, net profit reached NT$11.71 billion, a 73.2 percent surge from NT$6.76 billion a year earlier, with earnings per share increasing from NT$1.16 to NT$2 thanks to higher product prices and sustained customer demand.
The shareholders approved a company proposal to distribute cash dividends of NT$5.6 per share, based on last year’s net profit of NT$43.83 billion, or NT$7.5 per share.
The cash dividend, the highest in six years, translates into a yield of 6.22 percent based on the stock’s closing price of NT$90.1 in Taipei trading yesterday.
Formosa Chemicals last year saw earnings soar 58.9 percent from the previous year, while sales declined 3.1 percent annually to NT$319.2 billion, according to the company’s filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
The company attributed the earnings growth to higher contributions from its high-margin products and efficient cost controls.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to