Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運) yesterday said it holds a conservative outlook for this year as the US-China trade dispute has slowed the growth of Asian exports to the US, but added that it would improve its edge by using 58 new vessels in the Southeast Asian market.
The shipping company saw its revenue for the first five months jump 24 percent from a year earlier to NT$77.1 billion (US$2.48 billion), as its freight volume to the US and Southeast Asia has expanded, Evergreen Marine chairman Anchor Chang (張正鏞) told reporters after a shareholder’s meeting in Taoyuan.
The shipping arm of Evergreen Group (長榮集團) said it previously forecast that the US-China trade dispute would ease last month and was surprised that US President Donald Trump added to tariff hikes.
“We thought that we would have to battle against headwinds, but it turned out that we secured a lot of long-term contracts, as our clients trusted us and aimed to secure space amid uncertainty stemming from the trade dispute,” Chang said.
Apart from Dragon Boat Festival week, Evergreen Marine has since April sent vessels to the US with almost all of their containers full, he said.
The company’s freight volume to ASEAN members has grown stably this year, after annual increases of 15 percent in the past two years, Chang said.
With the trade dispute increasing the rate that companies are moving production from China to ASEAN, Evergreen Marine would find growth momentum with Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and the Philippines, he said.
Evergreen Marine has purchased 58 vessels of 1,900 to 2,800 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU), as most ports in the region can only accommodate smaller vessels, Chang said.
So far, the company has taken delivery of 18 2,800 TEU vessels, and would take delivery of another 40 by 2022, he said, adding that it would decommission aged vessels when the new ones are received.
Evergreen Marine’s total freight volume would increase in line with global market growth, or an average of 4 to 5 percent within the next five years, he said.
The trade dispute has affected shipping businesses worldwide, with the growth of Asian exports to the US sliding to only 1 percent so far this year, Evergreen Marine president Eric Hsieh (謝惠全) said, adding that imports to China have also dropped.
With higher standards for fuels with lower sulfur content to take effect in January next year, the company has taken a lead over its peers by purchasing 130 scrubbers for its vessels, Chang said.
Evergreen shares yesterday shed 0.4 percent to close at NT$12.45, while the group’s airline arm, EVA Airways (長榮航空), saw its share price plunge 3.85 percent to NT$15, with investors pessimistic over strike action launched by the airline’s union, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
RSS