Applied Materials Inc, the largest supplier of semiconductor-manufacturing equipment, forecast fiscal first quarter sales and profit that were in line with estimates amid rising machinery orders from contract chipmakers.
Revenue in the current period will climb 3 percent to 10 percent from the prior quarter, the company said in a statement on Thursday, indicating a range of US$2.05 billion to US$2.19 billion. Profit before certain costs will be US$0.20 to US$0.24 a share.
On average, analysts projected sales of US$2.19 billion and profit of US$0.23, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Applied Materials is benefiting from an increase in demand from companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) that build semiconductors for other chipmakers, as they upgrade plants for new production processes.
While chip-equipment orders — an indication of future sales — are growing, bookings slipped in the company’s display division, which makes machinery used to produce flat-panel screens.
“Display is trending weaker, but semiconductor is trending fine,” said Edwin Mok, an analyst at Needham & Co in San Francisco.
“Orders came a little bit weaker, but it was mostly display” that held them back, he added.
Applied Materials’ net income in the fourth quarter, which ended on Oct. 27, was US$183 million, or US$0.15 a share, compared with a loss of US$515 million, or US$0.42, a year earlier, the company said.
Excluding some costs, profit was US$0.19. Revenue climbed 21 percent to US$1.99 billion, the first year-over-year increase since 2011.
On average, analysts had predicted profit of US$0.18 of sales of US$1.97 billion.
Chief executive officer Gary Dickerson said in a telephone interview that next year will be a good year for the display business.
Larger screens in smartphones, bigger televisions and the introduction of curved displays will drive demand for screen machinery, Dickerson said.
Industrywide spending on equipment for chip plants will grow 10 percent to 20 percent next year, he said.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) forecast that its wafer shipments this quarter would grow up to 7 percent sequentially and the factory utilization rate would rise to 75 percent, indicating that customers did not alter their ordering behavior due to the US President Donald Trump’s capricious US tariff policies. However, the uncertainty about US tariffs has weighed on the chipmaker’s business visibility for the second half of this year, UMC chief financial officer Liu Chi-tung (劉啟東) said at an online earnings conference yesterday. “Although the escalating trade tensions and global tariff policies have increased uncertainty in the semiconductor industry, we have not
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
RSS