DRAM chipmaker Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said net profits last quarter more than doubled to NT$7.23 billion (US$246 million) from a year earlier as price hikes helped raise its gross margin to a record high amid unresolved supply constraints.
On a quarterly basis, net profits tumbled 67 percent without the gain of NT$16.12 billion from sales of Micron Technology Inc shares in the fourth quarter of last year.
However, a strong NT dollar prevented the chipmaker’s bottom line from breaking a new record.
Maybank estimated that Nanya Technology would make profit totaling NT$7.9 billion last quarter.
Unfavorable foreign-exchange rates saw the company incur a loss of NT$1.18 billion last quarter.
The rate impact was a double whammy for the chipmaker, as most of its revenue is in US dollars and it owns US dollars equal to NT$40 billion.
“We have implemented measures to hedge [against foreign-exchange volatility]… We expect foreign-exchange effects to improve significantly this quarter,” Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a media briefing.
Nanya Technology now has NT$20 billion in US dollars, after converting half of its cash funds into NT dollars, it said.
Given his outlook on the DRAM market, Lee said he maintains an upbeat tone.
As the world’s top three memory chip makers are keeping a tight rein on capacity expansion, Lee said he expects supply growth to continue lagging behind that of market demand, making room for further price hikes.
“The supply scarcity will be noticeable during the second quarter,” Lee said. “Average selling prices are likely to rise by a low-single digit percentage.”
That would help boost Nanya Technology’s gross margin to a new high this quarter and next quarter, Lee said.
Gross margin climbed to an all-time high of 51.3 percent last quarter, compared with 40.1 percent a year earlier and 49.7 percent in the third quarter of last year, the company’s financial statements showed.
Nanya Technology said it would crank out more cost-efficient 20-nanometer chips and more better-priced DDR4 chips to meet demand for bigger memory storage.
The chipmaker expects shipments this quarter to grow about 15 percent quarter-on-quarter. For the full year, shipments are expected to expand about 48 percent year-on-year, it said.
Servers are likely to be the biggest driver for DRAM consumption this year, thanks to emerging artificial intelligence applications and more cloud-enabled services, coupled with server replacement demand, Lee said.
On its migration to next-generation technology, Nanya Technology aims to produce a small amount of 10-nanometer memory chips in 2020, it said.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS