Catcher Technology Co (可成科技), which makes metal casings for Apple Inc’s MacBook Air notebook and iPad mini tablet, is likely to receive new smartphone orders early next year, Barclays Capital Securities Taiwan Ltd said.
The new orders will be for Apple’s new iPhone 5S and Samsung Electronics Co’s premium Galaxy series during the first half of next year, Barclays analysts led by Dale Gai (蓋欣山) and Kirk Yang (楊應超) said in a note released on Thursday.
Catcher, which also supplies metal casings for HTC Corp’s (宏達電) smartphones, is likely to benefit from the growing trend of leading smartphone vendors adopting metal casings in their phones. So far, Samsung is the only top-five smartphone brand which is not using metal casing for its products.
Photo: Bloomberg
However, that could change. South Korea’s Electronic Times newspaper reported on Aug. 30 that Samsung might build a production line at its plant in Gumi, about 260km southeast of Seoul, to produce handset casing from magnesium and aluminium by the end of this year. The world’s largest smartphone brand is likely to apply metal casing to its premium models set to be released early next year, according to a report on the paper’s Web site.
In their note, Barclays analysts said that based on their checks with supply chain companies,
Samsung is close to a final decision on the adoption of metal casings in at least one of its high-end smartphone models from the second quarter next year.
“Our checks suggest Catcher has been qualified as one of the major sources on the total metal casing smartphone volumes at 10 [million to] 30 million next year from Samsung,” the analysts wrote.
“The final order allocation is to be confirmed in early first quarter 2014, subject to price bids by approved vendors,” they added.
Pauline Chen (陳柏齡), an analyst at Credit Suisse AG’s Taipei securities branch, said in a note to her clients on Sept. 4 that if Samsung decides to use metal casing for its flagship model next year, it is very likely to outsource some orders to non-South Korean suppliers in order to meet the requirements for volume and quality.
Chen said Catcher could also gain more orders from Apple next year as the US company is likely to adopt a new strategy to add new electronics manufacturing service (EMS) providers, including Wistron Corp (緯創) and Inventec Corp (英業達), to reduce risks for new products.
“We believe that the news should be positive for independent metal casing suppliers such as Catcher or Ju Teng International Holdings Ltd (巨騰) as these ‘new’ EMS suppliers could prefer to team up with independent casing makers, over their competitors’ casing subsidiaries,” she wrote.
Moreover, Catcher’s increased iPhone orders could help it offset the order losses from HTC, according to Barclays analysts, who predicted a 20 percent annual sales decline for HTC next year from this year.
“The increasing likelihood that Catcher will see iPhone 5S order gains in the first half of 2014 will likely completely offset HTC-related risks,” they said.
Shares of Catcher closed at NT$155 on Wednesday. Barclays reiterated its “overweight” rating on the company’s shares, with a target price of NT$179.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
KEY SECTOR: Taiwan’s new chip legislation is insufficient, and a more strategic ‘chip act’ that covers the whole semiconductor ecosystem is needed, MediaTek’s chairman said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) yesterday urged the government to formulate a state semiconductor strategy and comprehensive “chip act” that includes local chip designers and smaller-scale semiconductor companies, as they are facing intensifying competition from China. The government is playing an increasingly important role in safeguarding the local semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, given that the US, the EU and Japan are offering hefty subsidies and significant tax incentives to build semiconductor capacity domestically, as they have realized the strategic importance of semiconductors, Tsai said. To implement such a program, the government should take steps to finance a “chip act,” Tsai said
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
RSS