Everlight Electronics Co (億光電子) expects revenue to grow this year from last year’s NT$30.61 billion (US$967.75 million), driven by rising demand for LED lighting from segments such as automobiles, company chairman Robert Yeh (葉寅夫) said.
As the company is close to digesting all of its excessive inventory this quarter, average selling prices for the firm’s LED lighting and LED backlight products will start to pick up next month, helping drive the company’s revenue, Yeh told reporters on Jan. 29 during the company’s year-end party.
Everlight will focus more on outdoor LED display products and commercial lighting applications, while gradually shifting its focus away from its own-brand fluorescent tubes and bulbs due to intensifying price competition, Yeh said.
He said the outdoor LED display and commercial lighting segments would also face competition from Chinese manufacturers, but Everlight would improve its product design to enhance its competitiveness.
Yeh said he was upbeat about the outlook for LED applications for automobiles in the near future.
“I foresee demand for automotive LED applications rising rapidly, so Everlight will put more resources in its automotive LED applications segment,” Yeh said.
Automotive LED products currently account for less than 5 percent of Everlight’s total revenue, while its backlight and lighting segments make up about 40 percent, the company said.
JPMorgan Securities Ltd said it agrees with Yeh’s decision to reduce the company’s emphasis on the low-margin brand business and focus on the high-margin LED component business.
The company’s strategy would offset the general downward margin pressure on LED lightning, JPMorgan analyst Narci Chang (張恆) said in a research note released on Feb. 6.
Chang said he expects Everlight’s dual LED flash for smartphones, the firm’s further market share gains in the TV backlighting sector and the orders it has won from international lighting brands to be the company’s main growth drivers this year.
“With these growth drivers in place, we estimate Everlight’s annual revenues will grow by 18 percent year-on-year to NT$36.01 billion this year,” Chang said.
This quarter, Chang said he expects Everlight’s revenue to drop about 7.95 percent to NT$7.52 billion, from NT$8.17 billion last quarter.
Chang predicted that the company’s sales would grow 25 percent quarterly next quarter due to strong demand for lighting applications and backlighting market share gains.
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
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
RSS