E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技), the world’s No. 1 supplier of e-paper displays, yesterday said that revenue this year would be little changed from last year’s NT$15.2 billion (US$494 million), as growing uptake of electronic shelf labels and e-notebooks would offset a slump in e-reader demand.
E-reader customers this year are adjusting their product portfolios to changing demand, but the rough transition is cutting demand for e-paper displays, the Hsinchu-based company said.
E Ink supplies e-paper displays for Amazon.com Inc’s and Rakuten Kobo Inc’s e-readers. E-paper displays used in e-readers and e-notebooks made up 70 percent of E Ink’s total revenue in the first half of this year.
“We still believe e-readers are a business with consistent growth. This year is an exception. Next year, the e-reader market will resume high-speed growth as experienced over the past few years,” E Ink president Johnson Lee (李政昊) said at an investors’ conference.
To reach its revenue goal, E Ink has to achieve a combined revenue of NT$8.69 billion in the third and fourth quarters, after making NT$6.51 billion in the first half of the year, and the company counts on rapidly growing demand for its electronic shelf labels and e-notebooks to support revenue growth.
“The use of electronic shelf labels is spreading to [major] retailers from grocery stores,” Lee said.
For the first time, “the consumption of e-paper displays will surpass that of e-readers this year in square-meter terms,” Lee said.
“We are optimistic about the electronic shelf labels’ growth rate,” Lee said, declining to answer an analyst’s question about the 20 to 30 percent annual growth previously forecast by E Ink.
China sales would see robust growth this year, despite slower store expansion by an Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴)-funded Chinese supermarket chain, E Ink said.
Chinese retailers last year followed their peers in the US and Europe in adopting electronic shelf labels, E Ink said.
E-paper displays used in electronic shelf labels made up about 17 percent of the company’s total revenue last year.
The company also expects to see annual growth in shipments of e-notebooks in China, as some local governments have restricted schools from using tablets out of concern for children’s eyesight.
With new colored e-paper displays to be available by the end of this year, E Ink said it expects e-notebooks to be a new growth driver next year.
The company expects gross margin to rebound in the second half of this year, bringing its full-year gross margin close to last year’s 41.32 percent, it said.
Royalty income, an important contributor to the firm’s profits, this year would be flat from last year’s NT$2.6 billion, E Ink said.
France cannot afford to ignore the third credit-rating reduction in less than a year, French Minister of Finance Roland Lescure said. “Three agencies have downgraded us and we can’t ignore this cloud,” he told Franceinfo on Saturday, speaking just hours after S&P lowered his country’s credit rating to “A+” from “AA-” in an unscheduled move. “Fundamentally, it’s an additional cloud to a weather forecast that was already pretty gray. It’s a call for lucidity and responsibility,” he said, adding that this is “a call to be serious.” The credit assessor’s move means France has lost its double-A rating at two of the
AI BOOST: Although Taiwan’s reliance on Chinese rare earth elements is limited, it could face indirect impacts from supply issues and price volatility, an economist said DBS Bank Ltd (星展銀行) has sharply raised its forecast for Taiwan’s economic growth this year to 5.6 percent, citing stronger-than-expected exports and investment linked to artificial intelligence (AI), as it said that the current momentum could peak soon. The acceleration of the global AI race has fueled a surge in Taiwan’s AI-related capital spending and exports of information and communications technology (ICT) products, which have been key drivers of growth this year. “We have revised our GDP forecast for Taiwan upward to 5.6 percent from 4 percent, an upgrade that mainly reflects stronger-than-expected AI-related exports and investment in the third
Mercuries Life Insurance Co (三商美邦人壽) shares surged to a seven-month high this week after local media reported that E.Sun Financial Holding Co (玉山金控) had outbid CTBC Financial Holding Co (中信金控) in the financially strained insurer’s ongoing sale process. Shares of the mid-sized life insurer climbed 5.8 percent this week to NT$6.72, extending a nearly 18 percent rally over the past month, as investors bet on the likelihood of an impending takeover. The final round of bidding closed on Thursday, marking a critical step in the 32-year-old insurer’s search for a buyer after years of struggling to meet capital adequacy requirements. Local media reports
RARE EARTHS: The call between the US Treasury Secretary and his Chinese counterpart came as Washington sought to rally G7 partners in response to China’s export controls China and the US on Saturday agreed to conduct another round of trade negotiations in the coming week, as the world’s two biggest economies seek to avoid another damaging tit-for-tat tariff battle. Beijing last week announced sweeping controls on the critical rare earths industry, prompting US President Donald Trump to threaten 100 percent tariffs on imports from China in retaliation. Trump had also threatened to cancel his expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in South Korea later this month on the sidelines of the APEC summit. In the latest indication of efforts to resolve their dispute, Chinese state media reported that
RSS