VIRTUAL REALITY
StarVR cancels share sale
Acer Inc’s (宏碁) virtual reality (VR) venture has dropped a plan to raise NT$540 million (US$17.65 million) through the issuance of 6 million new shares, a Taiwan Stock Exchange filing released on Friday showed. StarVR Corp (宏星技術) does not think it needs to raise funds after considering its operational and financial conditions, as well as the current capital market, Acer said. StarVR is to focus in the short term on the high-end commercial market of the VR gear segment, after deploying some of its gear in gaming zones at theme parks and shopping malls, said Acer, which holds a 63.25 percent stake in the company.
MANUFACTURING
Business mood weakens
The manufacturing sector showed weakening business sentiment last month at a time of lingering trade friction between the US and China, the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) said on Friday. The downbeat mood also reflected slower sales of smartphones and chips used for cryptocurrency mining, the institute said. The composite index for the sector fell 0.95 points from a month earlier to 100.52, it said.
INTERNET
Oath to set up R&D in Taiwan
Oath Inc, which owns digital content subdivisions AOL and Yahoo, on Friday announced that it would set up a research and development (R&D) center in Taiwan. The center would set trends for new products, optimize the user experience locally, and connect local and global markets, Oath media engineering department vice president Kelly Hirano said. The firm is expected to recruit about 100 artificial intelligence engineers, programmers, product designers and product managers this quarter.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
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