Shares of smartphone camera lens supplier Largan Precision Co (大立光) yesterday took a hit, as investor sentiment cooled ahead of Apple Inc’s iPhone launch on Wednesday next week.
The stock dipped 5.11 percent to close at NT$4,640 in Taipei trading, underperforming the broader market, which slid 0.64 percent to 10,924.30 points.
Other key companies in the Apple supply chain were also affected, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), which dropped 1.1 percent to NT$261, and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), which declined 1 percent to NT$79.30.
Largan’s bigger pullback reflected its disappointing sales last month.
The company on Wednesday said that revenue last month rose 10 percent annually to NT$5.51 billion (US$178.88 million), bringing aggregate sales in the first eight months of the year to NT$32 billion, 1.26 percent higher compared with a year earlier.
The results fell short of some analysts’ estimates.
Largan gave a conservative outlook for this month, saying it expects sales to hold at current levels, due to production yield challenges and limited capacity.
As the iPhone launch approaches, Largan’s growth prospects could be rocked by a number of developments, local media reported, citing a recent report by Morgan Stanley.
Apple has secured a 10 percent discount on smartphone camera lenses from suppliers, while the US technology giant is expected to slash the retail price of its premium OLED screen models and delay shipments of lower-priced LCD screen models, postponing Largan’s anticipated sales growth spurt, Morgan Stanley said earlier this week.
Other analysts said that as Largan is already producing at capacity, it has little room to take on additional orders from Android phone vendors, such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and other Chinese brands, which have been championing the company’s advanced triple-lens design.
Expanding production capacity would be a tall order for the company, which has been working with the government to find land for new plants, Largan has said.
Still, some analysts remain optimistic about Largan’s prospects next year, as the company is well positioned to benefit from aggressive upgrades in smartphone camera specifications.
The rear-facing camera of next year’s iPhones could be upgraded from this year’s 7-megapixel sensor with a four-piece lens to a 12-megapixel sensor with a five-piece lens, Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co (元大投顧) said.
Largan’s leading position in smartphone camera technology is further solidified by its seven-piece, periscope lens designs, which are expected to feature in next year’s flagship Android smartphones.
In addition, Huawei has been developing a camera module that utilizes motor control to enable more than two apertures on a single module, Yuanta said, adding that such complex designs would boost Largan’s gross margins.
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,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
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
RSS