PANEL MAKERS
CPT reports lower revenue
Flat-panel display maker Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (CPT, 中華映管) yesterday said revenue shrank 8.9 percent to NT$4.49 billion (US$140 million) last month, from November’s NT$4.92 billion, as shipments fell. Shipments of panels for mobile devices and for cars dropped 8.3 percent to 38.37 million units last month, from 41.86 million units in November, the company said in a statement. Shipments of PC panels plunged 26.8 percent to 139,000 units from 190,000 units a month earlier, it added. Last year, revenue slid 3.9 percent to NT$56.39 billion from NT$58.66 billion in 2013, it said.
BATTERIES
Simplo posts quarterly gain
Simplo Technology Co (新普科技), the nation’s largest notebook battery pack maker, which supplies battery packs to Apple Inc, yesterday posted quarterly revenue of NT$19.01 billion for last quarter, up 10.45 percent from a year earlier and up 24.98 percent from the previous quarter. Simplo’s sales reached NT$17.21 billion in the fourth quarter of the previous year and made NT$15.21 billion in the previous quarter. The firm’s consolidated revenue for all of last year was NT$60.01 billion, up 9.65 percent from the previous year’s NT$54.73 billion, according to a company filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
CHIPMAKERS
Aspeed sales beat estimate
Aspeed Technology Inc (信驊), which designs chips for servers that support cloud computing technology, reported record-high sales for last month at NT$84.67 million, up 2.87 percent month-on-month and 67.53 percent year-on-year. The company’s third-quarter revenue totaled NT$237 million, which was 4 percent higher than Morgan Stanley’s estimate. Morgan Stanley analyst Charlie Chan (詹家鴻) yesterday attributed last quarter’s performance to higher demand for servers in the US and China. The company indicated that orders remained strong into this month, Chan said in a note.
AUTOMAKERS
New vehicle sales rise
Sales of new cars last year rose 12 percent to 423,829 units, the highest since 2005, when the figure was a record-high 514,000 units, statistics provided by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications showed on Monday. Last month alone, the number of new vehicles sold in the nation rose 7.2 percent year-on-year to 41,799 units, in line with market expectations, the data showed. Hotai Motor Co (和泰汽車), which sells Toyota and Lexus vehicles in Taiwan, continued to lead the market last year, distributing 139,241 cars, with a 33 percent market share. “Consumer confidence in December continued to recover to close to the prior peak, keeping us positive on the Taiwan auto market entering 2015, since domestic consumption remains resilient and car replacement is still ongoing,” Morgan Stanley analyst Terence Cheng said in a note.
FAST FOOD
McNuggets deal launched
The Taiwan branch of McDonald’s Corp launched a Chicken McNuggets offer on Monday. From now until Jan. 27, people who purchase set meals at McDonald’s can get four Chicken McNuggets for NT$39, the company said, adding the move was to sustain the product’s popularity among consumers. Local consumers eat about 200 million Chicken McNuggets a year, the company said, an amount that if stacked vertically would be the height of 4,000 Taipei 101 skyscrapers.
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
TEMPORARY TRUCE: China has made concessions to ease rare earth trade controls, among others, while Washington holds fire on a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods China is effectively suspending implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminating investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, the White House announced. The White House on Saturday issued a fact sheet outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier in the week by US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Under the deal, China is to issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers
Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV’s China unit yesterday said that it had established sufficient inventories of finished goods and works-in-progress, and that its supply chain remained secure and stable after its parent halted wafer supplies. The Dutch company suspended supplies of wafers to its Chinese assembly plant a week ago, calling it “a direct consequence of the local management’s recent failure to comply with the agreed contractual payment terms,” Reuters reported on Friday last week. Its China unit called Nexperia’s suspension “unilateral” and “extremely irresponsible,” adding that the Dutch parent’s claim about contractual payment was “misleading and highly deceptive,” according to a statement
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