Wistron Corp (緯創) yesterday said it expects a flattish first half, but expects business to pick up in the second half of the year, driven by its non-PC operations.
“The [company’s] overall performance in the first half of the year is quite slow due to seasonality… However, I expect most of our major smartphone clients to boost their shipment volumes in the third and fourth quarters,” Wistron chairman Simon Lin (林憲銘) told a teleconference.
“The smartphone business will be a growth engine for Wistron in the second half,” he added.
The company’s total shipments — including smartphones, notebook computers, servers and televisions — are forecast to expand by as much as by 5 percent from last year, Lin said, without disclosing last year’s figures.
The company also expects annual revenue to grow from last year’s NT$623.27 billion (US$19.02 billion), he said, but declined to provide a growth range.
However, due to continued industry headwinds, Lin said he expects notebook shipments, which contributed more than 40 percent to the firm’s revenue last year, to decline this year.
A Wistron official said that annual notebook shipments could drop by between 5 and 10 percent from last year’s 19.3 million units.
Lin’s remarks came after Wistron said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange that its net income plunged 62.74 percent annually to NT$1.33 billion last year due to a weak PC market and asset impairment.
Earnings per share were NT$0.55 last year, compared with NT$1.5 in 2014.
The company booked an impairment loss of NT$96.8 million for long-term investments in the second quarter and a one-time liquidation loss of NT$380.9 million from Wistron Services BV due to the euro’s depreciation against the US dollar in the third quarter of last year.
That affected the firm’s margin performance, with its gross margin dropping 0.54 percentage points to 4.71 percent and its operating margin falling 0.26 percentage points to 0.38 percent last year.
The company’s board approved a proposal to distribute cash dividends of NT$1.2 per share and a stock dividend of 0.3 percent per common share.
That translates into a dividend yield of 5.91 percent based on yesterday’s closing price of NT$20.3.
Three experts in the high technology industry have said that US President Donald Trump’s pledge to impose higher tariffs on Taiwanese semiconductors is part of an effort to force Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to the negotiating table. In a speech to Republicans on Jan. 27, Trump said he intends to impose tariffs on Taiwan to bring chip production to the US. “The incentive is going to be they’re not going to want to pay a 25, 50 or even a 100 percent tax,” he said. Darson Chiu (邱達生), an economics professor at Taichung-based Tunghai University and director-general of
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) is reportedly making another pass at Nissan Motor Co, as the Japanese automaker's tie-up with Honda Motor Co falls apart. Nissan shares rose as much as 6 percent after Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported that Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) instructed former Nissan executive Jun Seki to connect with French carmaker Renault SA, which holds about 36 percent of Nissan’s stock. Hon Hai, the Taiwanese iPhone-maker also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), was exploring an investment or buyout of Nissan last year, but backed off in December after the Japanese carmaker penned a deal
WASHINGTON POLICY: Tariffs of 10 percent or more and other new costs are tipped to hit shipments of small parcels, cutting export growth by 1.3 percentage points The decision by US President Donald Trump to ban Chinese companies from using a US tariff loophole would hit tens of billions of dollars of trade and reduce China’s economic growth this year, according to new estimates by economists at Nomura Holdings Inc. According to Nomura’s estimates, last year companies such as Shein (希音) and PDD Holdings Inc’s (拼多多控股) Temu shipped US$46 billion of small parcels to the US to take advantage of the rule that allows items with a declared value under US$800 to enter the US tariff-free. Tariffs of 10 percent or more and other new costs would slash such
‘LEGACY CHIPS’: Chinese companies have dramatically increased mature chip production capacity, but the West’s drive for secure supply chains offers a lifeline for Taiwan When Powerchip Technology Corp (力晶科技) entered a deal with the eastern Chinese city of Hefei in 2015 to set up a new chip foundry, it hoped the move would help provide better access to the promising Chinese market. However, nine years later, that Chinese foundry, Nexchip Semiconductor Corp (合晶集成), has become one of its biggest rivals in the legacy chip space, leveraging steep discounts after Beijing’s localization call forced Powerchip to give up the once-lucrative business making integrated circuits for Chinese flat panels. Nexchip is among Chinese foundries quickly winning market share in the crucial US$56.3 billion industry of so-called legacy