MANUFACTURING
Ichia May revenue down 1%
Ichia Technologies Inc (毅嘉科技), which supplies handset keypads to BlackBerry Ltd, yesterday said revenue dropped 1 percent to NT$1.042 billion (US$34.6 million) last month from NT$1.041 billion in April, according to a company filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. On an annual basis, the figure represented an increase of 19.45 percent from NT$872 million. In the first five months of this year, Ichia made NT$4.88 billion in revenue, up about 38 percent from NT$3.54 billion in the same period of last year. Ichia general manager Larry Sun (孫永祥) told an investors’ conference in April that the company’s revenue and net profit may hit another record high this year, due to corporate restructuring and sales of new products.
TRADE
‘Flat panel queen’ to visit
China’s “flat panel queen,” Bai Weimin (白為民), is expected to purchase billions of dollars worth of flat panels when she visits this week for Taipei’s annual Computex show, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) said on Saturday. This year, China will buy mainly 4K2K flat panels, accounting for at least 20 percent of its total purchases, TAITRA said. TAITRA, the nation’s main trade promotion body, has invited Bai to Computex Taipei every year since 2009. Bai, deputy director of the China Video Industry Association, has pledged to buy at least US$4.5 billion worth of products, including 27 million flat panels during her visit this year, up 15 percent from last year, TAITRA chairman Wang Chih-kang (王志剛) said in April. Bai is also scheduled to attend a cross-strait cooperation conference on the display industry on Friday, TAITRA 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
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