Local semiconductor company Siliconware Precision Industries Co (SPIL, 矽品精密) yesterday posted second-quarter net income of NT$1.67 billion (US$51 million), or NT$0.54 in earnings per share, amid recovering demand, saying it expects third-quarter revenue to continue growing from the second quarter.
SPIL is the world’s second-largest chip packager and tester after the Kaohsiung-based Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (ASE, 日月光半導體).
The company said in a statement that its second-quarter profit was up 535 percent from NT$262 million, or NT$0.08 per share, in the first quarter but down 30.9 percent from NT$2.41 billion, or NT$0.77 a share, a year earlier.
Gross margin was 20.7 percent for the second quarter, up from 9.5 percent in the previous three months but was flat from the previous year’s 20.6 percent, the company said. Operating margin was 15.6 percent for the April-to-June period, compared with 2 percent in the previous three months and 15 percent a year earlier.
Quarterly revenue rose 53.6 percent quarter-on-quarter to NT$14.14 billion but fell 10.8 percent year-on-year, the Taichung-based company said.
Before yesterday’s investors conference, Citigroup estimated the company would post a quarterly profit of NT$1.79 billion or NT$0.56 per share, with a gross margin of 20 percent and an operating margin of 14 percent. But the company’s growth in quarterly revenue driven by strong consumer demand was much better than Credit Suisse’s estimate of a 10 percent to 15 percent rise.
SPIL chairman Bough Lin (林文伯) told investors that he expects third-quarter revenue to grow mildly quarter-on-quarter thanks to rising utilization rate, stable demand from the emerging market, as well as growth in applications for consumer electronics, communications and personal computers.
Lin said via a Webcast that he expected the company’s utilization rate to rise in the third quarter. He said the utilization rate for wire-bonding packaging will rise to 95 percent in the third quarter from 85 percent in the second quarter and 50 percent in the first.
As for the utilization rate for flip-chip ball-grid-array packaging, Lin said he expected it to rise to 90 percent in the third quarter from 80 percent in the second quarter and 40 percent in the first.
The utilization rate for IC logic testing equipment, meanwhile, is expected to rise to 80 percent in the third quarter, from 70 percent and 40 percent in the first two quarters, he said.
The firm has maintained unchanged its capital expenditure at NT$ 4 billion for this year, with NT$ 1.2 billion being planned to allocate for this quarter from NT$ 328 million in the second quarter, Lin said.
For the first half of the year, the company saw its net income drop 53.7 percent to NT$1.93 billion with an EPS of NT$0.62. First-half revenue fell 24.2 percent to NT$23.34 billion.
Shares of Siliconware Precision fell 1.02 percent to NT$43.5 yesterday on the Taiwan Stock Exchange ahead of the investors conference.
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