AU Optronics Corp (友達光電) yesterday said it has sufficient capital to repay its bank loans after it obtained a new syndicated loan of NT$26.9 billion (US$911 million) last month.
AU Optronics’ comments came after the Chinese-language Commercial Times yesterday reported that the nation’s second-largest LCD panel maker was in talks with local lenders, led by Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行), to borrow NT$30 billion to repay some of its bank loans that are due within a year.
“The company on Oct. 25 inked agreements to borrow NT$26.9 billion in syndicated loans,” chief financial officer Andy Yang (楊本豫) said in a statement.
As of the end of the previous quarter, AU Optronics had NT$40 billion in bank loans, with NT$70 billion in cash and equivalents, Yang told investors last month.
The company needs to pay back NT$56.8 billion within a year.
The company’s sales dropped by 4.7 percent quarter-on-quarter to NT$107.08 billion last quarter, with net profit down 37 percent sequentially to NT$2.49 billion, or earnings per share of NT$0.26.
Net debt-to-equity ratio improved to 70.3 percent last quarter, from 74.7 percent in the second quarter and 93 percent a year ago, the company said.
Innolux Corp (群創光電), the nation’s top LCD panel maker, last month said that it was in talks with local banks to restructure its NT$45 billion loans.
It said it expected to finalize the talks next quarter.
Innolux will have to pay back NT$65.35 billion in bank loans that are due in a year.
In the third quarter, Innolux reported sales of NT$97.1 billion, down 13 percent from the second quarter, with net profit declining 83 percent to NT$686 million, or earnings per share of NT$0.08.
The firm’s net debt-to-equity ratio reduced to 87.6 percent last quarter from 93.7 percent in the second quarter and 134.3 percent in the third quarter of last year.
State-run banks have lent NT$400 billion to the nation’s major LCD panel makers, Minister of Finance Chang Sheng-ford (張盛和) on Monday told legislators, who expressed concerns that state-owned lenders would have to write off bad debts if the borrowers defaulted.
Lenders were forced to write off massive bad debts after money-losing PC DRAM chipmaker ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德科技) failed to pay back NT$23.93 billion in bank loans.
AU Optronics’ stock price declined 1.52 percent to NT$8.44 in Taipei trading yesterday, marking a third day of decline.
Shares in Innolux plummeted 2.1 percent to NT$9.79. The TAIEX inched up 0.84 percent.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) yesterday said it plans to resume operations at two coal-fired power generators for three months to boost security of electricity supply as liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply risks are running high due to the Middle East conflict. The two coal-fired power generators are at Mailiao Power Plant in Yunlin County’s Mailiao Township (麥寮). The plant, operated by Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), supplied electricity to Taipower’s power grid until the end of last year. Taipower’s decision came about one month after Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) on March 10 said that the nation had no imminent
Some robotaxi passengers were left stranded in the middle of fast-moving traffic in a major Chinese city after their driverless vehicles stopped running, according to police and media reports on Wednesday. A preliminary investigation indicates more than 100 robotaxis came to a halt because of a “system malfunction,” police in the city of Wuhan said in a statement, without elaborating. No injuries were reported. One passenger told Chinese media that their robotaxi stopped after turning a corner. An instruction on a screen read: “Driving system malfunction. Staff are expected to arrive in 5 minutes.” After no one showed up, the passenger pushed
RSS