Macronix International Co (旺宏電子), a local maker of memory chips that counts Nintendo Co among its clients, said yesterday its net income fell to NT$825 million (US$25 million), or NT$0.26 in earnings per share, in the fourth quarter on falling shipments amid the global economic downturn.
The Hsinchu-based company’s net income reached a five-year high of NT$2.12 billion, or NT$0.68 in earnings per share, in the third quarter. It made a profit of NT$1.24 billion or NT$0.41 per share in the fourth quarter of 2007.
Macronix produces read-only memory (ROM) products and NOR flash memory chips for clients.
Quarterly revenue fell 26 percent from the previous quarter and 7 percent from a year earlier to NT$5.59 billion in the three months ended Dec. 31, the company’s data showed.
“The sequential revenue decrease was a result of seasonal sliding demand for all product lines and the economic downturn,” Macronix said in a statement.
Gross profit was NT$2.38 billion, a 27 percent drop quarter-on-quarter and 8 percent decline year-on-year.
Gross margin for the fourth quarter was 43 percent, which was similar to a year earlier and the previous quarter, the company said.
From October to last month, the company’s capacity utilization rate was 69 percent, which fell below its October guidance of between 80 percent and 85 percent.
The company recorded 97 percent capacity utilization in the third quarter.
For the whole of last year, the company’s profits were about NT$4.5 billion, or NT$1.45 in earnings per share, which was nearly on a par with its 2007 profits of NT$4.65 billion.
On its outlook for the first-quarter, Macronix said it expected revenue to continue to erode because of sluggish demand and the global economic downturn.
The company’s first-quarter guidance was that total unit shipments would drop between 20 percent and 30 percent from the fourth quarter, average selling prices may decline between 20 percent and 25 percent from the previous quarter and gross profit margin may fall between 15 percent and 20 percent.
The capacity utilization rate may drop to between 40 percent and 50 percent, the company said.
Capital expenditure in the fourth quarter was NT$588 million, up from NT$256 million in the previous quarter.
Macronix attributed the rise in capital spending mainly to the need to upgrade production equipment.
The company gave no capital spending forecast for the first quarter.
Macronix reported a strong cash position and a relatively low debt ratio as of the end of last month, which was likely to help it through the difficult economic climate.
The company’s data indicated it had NT$18.64 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of the end of last month, while its debt-to-asset ratio was at 0.14 and lower than 0.16 in the third quarter.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said Taiwan’s government plans to set up a business service company in Kyushu, Japan, to help Taiwanese companies operating there. “The company will follow the one-stop service model similar to the science parks we have in Taiwan,” Kuo said. “As each prefecture is providing different conditions, we will establish a new company providing services and helping Taiwanese companies swiftly settle in Japan.” Kuo did not specify the exact location of the planned company but said it would not be in Kumamoto, the Kyushu prefecture in which Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC, 台積電) has a
RSS