Shares of Inotera Memories Inc (華亞科技) soared yesterday after the DRAM maker upgraded its shipment forecast for the second quarter amid lingering optimism toward global demand, dealers said.
Strong interest also reflected a move by Barclays Capital to raise its target price on shares of Inotera — a joint venture between Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) and Micron Technology Inc of the US — which prompted investors to chase prices soon after the local bourse opened, the dealers said.
Shares of Inotera surged 4.8 percent to NT$41.45 in Taipei trading yesterday, out-performing the TAIEX, which was down 0.11 percent at 9,111.50 points.
“The shipment forecast upgrade for the April-June period served as the major catalyst to a strong showing of the stock today,” MasterLink Securities (元富證券) analyst Tom Tang (湯忠謙) said.
“The revised estimate indicates that Inotera will continue to benefit from solid demand for mobile devices as the company has assigned large resources to specialty DRAM production to cater to mobile device manufacturers,” he said.
In an investor conference on Wednesday, Inotera said that it has raised the sequential shipment growth estimate for the second quarter from 1 to 2 percent to 5 percent.
If DRAM prices continue to rise as expected, it gross margin for the second quarter could top 54 percent seen in the first quarter, it said.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS