YFY Inc (永豐餘投資控股), a consortium of paper manufacturing and biotechnology businesses, said paper and pulp prices had bottomed out in the October-December quarter. The firm expected prices to continue rising this quarter to offset the declining contribution from its e-paper manufacturing unit.
Paper and pulp prices increased 5 percent last quarter from the fourth quarter of last year, and they are expected to rise approximately 6 percent sequentially this quarter, YFY spokesman Yin Kuo-tang (殷國堂) told investors yesterday at a conference.
Yin said the company’s first-quarter performance improved from the previous quarter, without offering exact numbers.
Yin said that the company planned to expand its capacity to produce household paper in Taiwan and China from 175,000 tonnes to 420,000 tonnes a year by 2015.
The company also expected that its sales of radio frequency identification (RFID) self-adhesive paper labels would increase to 1 billion units this year, from between 800 million and 900 million units last year.
YFY used to be known as Yuen Foong Yu Paper Manufacturing Co. Last year, the company reported NT$1.09 billion in net profit, down 45 percent from NT$2 billion a year earlier.
The company’s financial report showed its operating profit last year was NT$2.02 billion, up 46 percent from NT$1.39 billion the previous year, but its non-operating profit dropped 63 percent year-on-year to NT$733 million from NT$1.97 billion a year ago.
The declining investment income resulted from the losses of NT$749 million posted last year by E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技), which supplies e-paper displays to Amazon.com Inc and Sony Corp for their e-readers.
“Most people are now using smartphones and tablet PCs, and we do not know when there would be more companies trying to develop electronic papers,” Yin said.
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