Catcher Technology Co (可成科技), which makes metal casings for Apple Inc’s MacBook Air notebooks and iPad Mini tablets, yesterday reported that its first-quarter net profit fell 23.9 percent annually to NT$2.98 billion (US$98.69 million) due to lower non-operating income.
Earnings per share were NT$3.97 in the January-to-March period, compared with NT$5.22 per share a year earlier.
Despite a 18.8 percent increase in operating expenses, Catcher’s operating income grew 9.5 percent annually to NT$3.2 billion last quarter, mainly because the company’s sales expanded 12.8 percent from a year earlier, chief financial officer James Wu (巫俊毅) said in an earnings conference call.
However, due to lower-than-expected non-operating income, including interest and foreign exchange gains, Catcher’s pretax profit shrank 17 percent to NT$3.85 billion last quarter from a year ago, when it generated NT$1.72 billion in non-operating income, he said.
GROWTH GOALS
“Our sales are likely to take off beginning in this quarter, as most clients entered new product cycles last month,” Wu said.
“Achieving 15 percent sequential growth in sales this quarter should be possible for us,” chairman Allen Hung (洪水樹) said, echoing Wu and describing Catcher’s smartphone business as its main sales driver.
Sequential growth of 15 percent would require Catcher’s sales to expand from NT$10.41 billion last quarter to NT$11.97 billion this quarter, which would be its second-highest level ever. In the fourth quarter of last year, sales hit NT$13.11 billion.
Gross margin for this quarter is expected to be sustained between 41 and 45 percent as a result of a larger business scale, Wu said.
The company’s first-quarter gross margin was 41.3 percent.
To cope with growing orders for smartphone casings, Catcher on Tuesday last week announced that it plans to purchase NT$5 billion of computer numerical control (CNC) machines.
CAPITAL INVESTMENT
The new CNC machines would be installed at Catcher’s plants in China’s Suzhou and Taizhou cities beginning in August, and they are expected to boost the company’s total capacity by 20 percent this year from the previous, Hung said.
The number of CNC machines is to be increased to about 20,000 units this year from last year’s 16,000 units, including the 2,000 units purchased earlier this year, he added.
Other than Apple, Catcher also supplies casings to Nokia Oyj, Sony Corp and HTC Corp (宏達電), as well as PC brands including Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc, among others.
Sales of metal casings used in smartphones and tablet devices accounted for 60 percent of Catcher’s total sales last quarter, while sales of notebook casings composed the remaining 40 percent, Hung said.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
RSS