Shareholders of memory module supplier Adata Technology Co (威剛科技) on Friday approved a proposal to distribute a cash dividend of NT$6 per common share — the highest in four years, the company said.
That represented a payout ratio of 69.85 percent based on the company’s earnings of NT$8.59 per share last year. Earnings last year totaled NT$1.84 billion (US$61.33 million) — the highest since 2013.
Last year “was the longest upcycle in the history of the memorychip industry as a supply crunch of DRAM and NAND flash memory chips drove up chip prices all the way to [early this year],” Adata chairman Simon Chen (陳立白) said in the company’s annual report.
The supply and demand imbalance was attributable to increased demand from cloud computing, big data and emerging cryptocurrency mining, along with limited supply amid a bottleneck in technological upgrade, Chen said in the report.
“The company benefited from the industrial boom as it adopted proper procurement approaches and multiple suppliers [of memory chips],” he said.
Adata expects the DRAM chip industry to remain stable this year, supported by limited new supply and growing demand for gaming PCs, cloud computing and data centers, he said.
That uptrend should continue to fuel the company’s growth this year, he said.
Rising demand from the automotive sector, smartphones and PCs should help stabilize demand and prices of NAND flash memory chips in the second half of this year, he added.
Overall, Adata expects revenue to be higher in the second half of this year than the first half based on historical patterns.
The company already saw an upturn in last month’s revenue, which surged 20.39 percent to NT$2.96 billion from NT$2.46 billion in April, Adata said.
On an annual basis, revenue increased 16.35 percent from NT$2.55 billion.
DRAM chips accounted for 66.5 percent of total revenue, up from 57.51 percent in the prior month.
In the first five months of this year, revenue rose 2.26 percent to NT$13.38 billion, compared with NT$13.08 billion during the same period last year.
Another memory module supplier, Transcend Information Inc (創見資訊), on Thursday last week said that shareholders had approved the distribution of a cash dividend of NT$6 per common share.
Transcend Information saw its net profit shrink 7.64 percent to NT$2.66 billion last year, compared with NT$2.88 billion in 2016, as non-operating losses widened to NT$685 million.
Earnings per share dropped to NT$6.17 last year from NT$6.68 in 2016.
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