MOBILE
Ichia revenue falls 30%
Handset keypad maker Ichia Technologies Inc (毅嘉科技) on Friday reported revenue of NT$377 million (US$12.25 million) for last month, up 0.03 percent from a year earlier, but a decline of 30 percent from the previous month, due to fewer working days during the Lunar New Year holiday. Last month’s revenue included about NT$294 million in sales from flexible printed circuit integrated components and about NT$84 million from mechanical integrated components, the company said. Cumulative revenue in the first two months of this year decreased 6.28 percent year-on-year to NT$917.45 million, Ichia said.
RETAIL
Forever 21 closing last store
Los Angeles-based fast fashion brand Forever 21 has decided to pull out of Taiwan at the end of this month after closing its last outlet near Taipei’s Zhongxiao Dunhua MRT Station, affecting 58 jobs. In a letter to employees revealed on Friday, the retailer said that business in Taiwan has not been good in the past few years and that it would shutter the Zhongxiao outlet on March 31. The retailer entered Taiwan in June 2015 and launched its first outlet in Taipei’s prime Xinyi District (信義). It closed the Xinyi outlet in September last year when the lease expired.
ELECTRONICS
Xiaomi GM likely leaving
Xiaomi Taiwan general manager Henman Lee (李佳峰) is reportedly exiting the company after more than five years of working at the Chinese smartphone brand, local media reported on Friday, citing market speculation. Lee’s post is likely to be filled by Janine Luo (羅燕), head of Xiaomi’s Hong Kong and US operations, the reports said. Xiaomi Taiwan declined to comment on Lee’s departure or his successor.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by