Yageo Corp’s (國巨) share price yesterday reached NT$1,000 for the first time in the company’s 31-year history, with investors buoyed by the rosy business outlook for the nation’s top passive component supplier.
Yageo became a member of the exclusive NT$1,000 club on the local stock market, joining Apple Inc camera lens supplier Largan Precision Co (大立光).
Largan shares yesterday closed 2.73 percent lower at NT$4,090 in Taipei trading.
Yageo shares surged 9.53 percent, as the company’s market value ballooned to NT$350.6 billion (US$11.77 billion) from NT$124.25 billion on Jan. 2.
The shares have risen 282 percent since the beginning of this year, outperforming the TAIEX’s 1.53 percent increase during the same period.
The rally came after Yageo reported a net profit of NT$2.61 billion for last month amid persistent demand for passive components.
That translated into earnings per share of NT$7.43.
In just a month, Yageo has earned about 63 percent of the NT$4.26 billion, or earnings per share of NT$12.15, the company made during the whole of last quarter, boding well for the company’s earnings this quarter and the rest of the year.
Yageo last month said that the market uptrend would extend into the rest of this year and next, fueled primarily by increasing demand for high-margin products used in electric cars, autonomous vehicles, industrial devices, premium smartphones and new applications, such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence devices.
Average selling prices have been on the rise due to a supply crunch, the firm said.
In his annual report to the company’s shareholders, Yageo chairman Pierre Chen (陳泰銘) said that the company would make every effort to grow earnings and strengthen its global competitiveness, including enhancing its technological capabilities and optimizing its product portfolio.
Yageo aims to increase revenue contribution from higher-margin passive components for electric cars and industrial devices, he said.
Yageo would take appropriate measures to hedge against foreign-exchange-rate volatility, which is considered one of the uncertainties the company is facing this year, the report said.
Global trade disputes, spreading trade protectionism and price competition are also challenges Yageo has to overcome this year, Chen said.
Yageo had a 34 percent share of the global chip resistor market last year, while seizing 13 percent of the multilayer ceramic capacitor market.
The company is scheduled to hold an annual shareholders’ meeting on June 5 to vote on the management’s proposal to distribute a dividend of NT$15 per common share from its earnings per share of NT$15.64 last year and NT$0.64 per share from its capital surplus.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their