Acer Inc (宏碁) yesterday announced plans to spin off its PC gaming accessories and smart devices businesses into a new wholly owned subsidiary to promote innovation and entrepreneurship within the company and to tap into market segments with higher profit margins.
The new unit, tentatively named Gadget Technology Inc (酷碁), would be the new home of Acer’s expansions into premium PC gaming mice and keyboards, headphones, suitcases and chairs, as well as smart devices, such as prayer beads and air quality monitors, Acer spokesperson Wayne Chang (張鉅靈) told a news conference at the Taiwan Stock Exchange in Taipei.
Sales of peripherals and accessories during the first half of this year are estimated at about NT$300 million (US$9.8 million), he said.
Asked whether Acer intends to let Gadget Technology serve as the company’s internal start-up incubator and if it plans to stage an initial public offering for the unit, Chang said that neither option has been ruled out.
Acer, which bundles accessories to promote PC sales, has not yet decided on whether the unit would be billed Gadget Technology after it begins to operate independently as a subsidiary, he said.
The businesses, which were grouped under Acer’s information technology business unit, are valued at about NT$45 million, Chang said, adding that they are scheduled to be spun off on Sept. 14.
NT$75.66 million in assets and NT$30.66 million in liabilities would be transferred to Gadget Technology, he added.
Boosted by strong sales of PC gaming laptops, Acer yesterday reported that net income in the second quarter rose 24.4 percent to NT$881 million, or earnings per share of NT$0.29, its highest level for the April-to-June period in eight years.
Consolidated revenue in the period totaled NT$58.48 billion, up 9.1 percent from a year earlier.
Gross profit was NT$6.43 billion with a margin of 11 percent, while operating income totaled NT$930 million with a margin of 1.6 percent, the company said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS