Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) yesterday reported the largest drop in monthly revenue among the Formosa Plastics Group’s (台塑集團) four core companies, stock exchange filings showed.
The refiner said in the filing that its revenue last month fell 22.8 percent to NT$66.496 billion (US$2.21 billion) from April due to recent declines in global crude oil and ethylene prices, which have affected sales of its petrochemical products.
Meanwhile, weakening petrochemical demand from China also contributed to sales declining last month from NT$86.16 billion in April.
On an annual basis, Formosa Petrochemical’s revenue dropped 3.8 percent, the filing showed.
CHINA DEPENDENCY
Formosa Petrochemical president Tsao Mihn (曹明) said that China consumption is slumping. While bank credit may be readily available in China, 40 percent of processing plants in the country are barely breaking even and 30 percent are in the red, while many companies are not borrowing because of fears they will not be able to repay the loans, he said.
Tsao worried that China had yet to bottom out and said that manufacturers were still cutting their inventories.
‘DEMAND CRISIS’
“The crisis this time around is a demand crisis, quite unlike 2008, when it was a financial crisis,” Tsao said.
In yesterday’s filings, Formosa Plastics Corp (台塑), the group’s flagship company, saw last month’s sales fall 6.7 percent month-on-month to NT$14.04 billion and 16.4 percent year-on-year, while Formosa Chemicals and Fibre Corp (台灣化纖) — which produces aromatics and styrenics — reported a 4.9 percent revenue drop to NT$25.05 billion from the previous month, but an increase of 3.6 percent from a year earlier.
Nan Ya Plastics Corp (南亞塑膠), the nation’s largest plastics maker, reported a sequential sales decline of 6.8 percent to NT$14.07 billion last month, a drop of 14.2 percent from one year ago, its filing showed.
Overall, the group’s four core companies posted a combined revenue of NT$119.66 billion last month, down 16.1 percent month-on-month. Revenues in the first five months of the year reached NT$666.96 billion, down 3 percent from a year earlier.
Additional reporting by CNA
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
AT HIGH CAPACITY: Three-month order visibility on stable customer demand would push factory utilization to between 80 and 85 percent, Vanguard’s president said Foundry service provider Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) yesterday said it is unable to fully satisfy surging demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers and data centers, amid an AI infrastructure investment boom that is crowding out production of less advanced chips. Vanguard is facing an “undersupply of chips” made using mature process technologies, due to strong demand for AI products and improving demand from customers in the commercial, industrial and auto sectors, which are digesting excess inventory to a healthier level, company chairman Fang Leuh (方略) told a virtual investors’ conference. However, Vanguard gave a more conservative view on
RSS