Wintek Corp (勝華科技), which supplies flat panels to global handset makers like Apple Inc and Nokia, yesterday said losses narrowed to NT$997 million (US$31.69 million) last quarter, as rising contributions from high-margin touch panels partly offset price erosion in other mobile panels.
The first-quarter results represented an improvement from losses of NT$1.17 billion a year earlier.
The Taichung-based company lost NT$518 million in the final quarter of last year.
The first-quarter losses were also the company’s 11th consecutive quarter in the red amid rising competition as more LCD panel makers, which used to focus on PC panels, allocated more capacity to the production of small and medium-sized screens such as those used in mobile phones.
“Rising contribution from touch panels helped the company’s losses to contract in the traditionally slack first quarter,” Wintek spokesman James Chen (陳政慧) said by telephone yesterday.
Wintek posted a revenue of NT$7.53 billion in the first three months of this year, with touch panels accounting for more than 35 percent of the total, up from 30 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, Chen said.
Foreseeing a better-than-usual second quarter, “revenues will increase in the second quarter, helped by rapidly growing customer demand for touch panels,” he said.
“Quarterly growth is rarely seen in the seasonally slow second quarter,” Chen said, but declined to give an estimate.
“We hope the touch panel business will give a boost to revenues and profits later this year as few touch panel makers can compete with Wintek in supplying global handset brands,” he said.
To support growth, Wintek plans to spend more on expanding touch panel capacity in China, Chen said.
He did not provide detailed figures.
Capital spending this year will surpass last year’s NT$2.6 billion, he said.
Shares of Wintek dropped 1.08 percent to close at NT$27.55 yesterday, underperforming the benchmark TAIEX, which gained 0.33 percent.
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