PANELMAKERS
AUO revenue down 4.6%
AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), the nation’s No. 2 LCD panelmaker, yesterday said revenue dropped 4.6 percent last month to NT$32.15 billion (US$1.02 billion), compared with NT$33.68 billion in December last year. However, shipments of PC and TV panels rose 2.7 percent to 9.6 million units last month from 9.35 million units in the prior month, it said. Shipments of small and medium-sized flat panels increased 5.6 percent month-on-month to 13.65 million. The results implied that price decline curtailed AUO’s revenue last quarter. The contraction in shipments matched AUO’s forecast last week. The company said last week that slow seasonal demand would lead to a high single-digit to low-teens percentage decline in shipments of its PC and TV panels. Prices will be flat, or fall slightly this quarter from last quarter, the company said.
TELECOMS
Chunghwa touts Toyota deal
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), Taiwan’s largest wireless carrier, said on Thursday it will make a greater push into a connected car project with Toyota as part of its fourth-generation (4G) service expansion. The partnership with the Japanese automaker began last year, providing tablet PCs with 4G connectivity for Toyota vehicles. It allows owners to check tire pressure and monitor images in their cars, even when they are not driving, said Lin Kuo-feng (林國豐), president of Chunghwa Telecom’s mobile business group. The two companies are expected to discuss integration of their back-end control systems to provide a wider range of 4G-enabled services and applications, Lin told reporters. As of the end of last year, Chunghwa Telecom had 1.33 million subscribers to its 4G mobile network — 38.6 percent of the nation’s 3.45 million 4G users — seven months after the launch of 4G operations in Taiwan.
MOBILE DEVICES
Xiaomi to release products
Xiaomi Corp (小米), China’s top smartphone maker by domestic shipments, said on Thursday that it will begin sales of its second-generation Redmi phone and Mi Pad tablet in Taiwan next week to expand its 4G offerings here. Online registration for the Redmi 2 opened at noon on Thursday and the mid-tier phone will be available on Thursday next week at a price of NT$3,799, the Beijing-based company said in a statement. The Mi Pad is to go on sale two days earlier at NT$6,999, with a limited amount of initial shipments, Xiaomi said.
COMPUTERS
Acer back on top in Canada
Acer Inc (宏碁) finished strongly in Canada’s PC market last year as the Taiwanese manufacturer regained the title of top laptop maker there in November and December. Acer captured more than 26 percent of the Canadian notebook market in each of the months, which the company on Thursday said was due to increased consumer purchasing during the holiday shopping season. The result also marked Acer’s highest notebook market share in Canada in the past 18 months, sending it back to the top among all laptop makers in Canada, the New Taipei-based company said. However, on a quarterly basis, Acer ranked only second in Canada’s laptop market for the fourth quarter in a row despite an 8.3 percent year-on-year growth in shipments. The company did not give its quarterly market share or rankings of other vendors for the October-December period.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
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