Bucking the downward trend of flat panel shares, Wintek Corp (勝華科技), Taiwan's No.1 maker of small and medium-sized color screens, surged to a three-year high yesterday on the TAIEX amid thriving handset demand, analysts said.
"Wintek shares are resistant to the downward spiral as investors anticipated a spike in profits driven by the increased replacement of gray-scale handsets by color-display models this year," said Roger Yu (
Global mobile phone shipments are expected to post an 8 percent growth rate to surpass 500 million units in 2004, helped by strong growth in camera phones and demand in emerging markets, according to international market researcher IDC's forecast.
"More than half of the new cellular phones shipped this year will be equipped with color screens," Yu said.
Wintek, which supplies color displays to Japanese consumer electronics makers Sanyo Electric Co and Hitachi Ltd, gained NT$0.3, or 0.71 percent, to close at NT$42.8, outpacing the benchmark index's 0.34-percent rise yesterday.
Chung set the target price for the color-screen maker between NT$48 and NT$50, adding that there was the likelihood of a rise in price. Wintek is expected to report earnings per share at NT$4 for 2004, he said.
Compared to Wintek's rise, stocks of AU Optronics Corp (
Smaller rivals HannStar Display Corp (瀚宇彩晶) and Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (華映) fell 1.15 percent and 0.45 percent, respectively, after overseas fund managers dumped panel shares.
Kevin Chung (
The Taichung-based Wintek yesterday said April sales more than doubled to NT$2.45 billion from a year ago, which made first-quarter sales surge 122.39 percent to NT$6.24 billion from the same period last year.
"Prospects for the industry look fair this year as small and medium-size panel makers are to benefit from a continuous strong appetite for color displays from mobile phone vendors," Wintek spokesperson Susie Lee (李淑薏) told the Taipei Times in a telephone interview.
About 70 percent of these panels go to handset makers, while the remaining 30 percent go to consumer electronics such as digital cameras, or small-sized flat-screen televisions installed in cars, Lee said.
The strong growth has outstripped the 80 percent growth forecast by the Market Intelligence Center (MIC, 資訊市場情報中心) during the first half of 2004.
Taiwan's small and medium-display panel manufacturers are expected to produce NT$11.52 billion worth of goods, a spike from NT$644 million a year earlier, the MIC said in the report yesterday.
"Ongoing strong demand from color-panel mobile phones, digital cameras and portable VCD/DVD players since the second half of 2003 are driving up sales," said Annabelle Hsu (徐美雯), an analyst at the government-funded researcher.
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