Pegatron Corp’s (和碩) performance in the second half of this year is expected to grow from the first half on the back of clients’ planned product launches and a relatively low base in the first six months, a company executive said yesterday.
“The operations in the second half of this year will be much better than the first half, but the scale of the growth would become clearer in the next one or two months,” Pegatron chief executive officer Jason Cheng (程建中) told reporters after the firm’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Taipei.
Pegatron’s revenue depends largely on its smartphone assembling business, with the firm’s communications segment contributing as much as 61 percent of its total revenue in the first quarter of this year.
Pegatron, a major assembler of Apple Inc’s iPhones, saw combined revenue contract 8.15 percent year-on-year to NT$388.15 billion (US$12.03 billion) in the first five months, mainly due to sluggish iPhone 6S sales.
Cheng said that overall demand in the first half was weaker than in the past few years, but the size of the decline is still within company estimates.
He said that demand in the second half will be driven by a wide range of product launches by Pegatron’s clients from different segments, including orders for Pegatron’s game consoles with rising demand for virtual reality (VR) applications.
“Our goal is to maintain annual revenue of more than NT$1 trillion this year,” Cheng said, declining to say whether Pegatron’s revenue would decline from last year’s record-high of NT$1.21 trillion.
Cheng said Pegatron has been adjusting its resources and organization since last year, increasing investments in new areas — such as automotive electronics and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications — as part of Pegatron’s long-term strategy to diversify its operations.
The company is also to invest in developments in robotics, especially for industrial robots used in manufacturing because of the climbing demand for industrial automation and intellectualization, Cheng said.
Cheng said that the company is evaluating the feasibility of setting up a manufacturing plant in India, with original design manufacturer (ODM) peers Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), Inventec Corp (英業達), Wistron Corp (緯創) and Compal Electronics Co (仁寶) all having stepped into the Indian market.
Pegatron chief operating officer S.J. Liao (廖賜政) said the company is also considering regulations and infrastructure in India and personnel to manage India-based workers before making a final decision of whether to enter the market.
Pegatron shareholders yesterday approved the company’s proposal to distribute a cash dividend of NT$5 per common share based on the company’s net income of NT$23.81 billion, or NT$9.23 per share, last year.
That represents a payout ratio of 54.17 percent and suggests a yield of 7.14 percent based on the company’s closing price of NT$70 in Taipei trading yesterday.
NEW IDENTITY: Known for its software, India has expanded into hardware, with its semiconductor industry growing from US$38bn in 2023 to US$45bn to US$50bn India on Saturday inaugurated its first semiconductor assembly and test facility, a milestone in the government’s push to reduce dependence on foreign chipmakers and stake a claim in a sector dominated by China. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened US firm Micron Technology Inc’s semiconductor assembly, test and packaging unit in his home state of Gujarat, hailing the “dawn of a new era” for India’s technology ambitions. “When young Indians look back in the future, they will see this decade as the turning point in our tech future,” Modi told the event, which was broadcast on his YouTube channel. The plant would convert
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said the DRAM supply crunch could extend through 2028, as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has led the world’s major memory makers to dramatically reduce production of standard DRAM and allocate a significant portion of their capacity for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. The most severe supply constraints would stretch to the first half of next year due to “very limited” increases in new DRAM capacity worldwide, Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a news briefing. The company plans to increase monthly 12-inch wafer capacity to 20,000 in the first half of 2028 after a
Property transactions in the nation’s six special municipalities plunged last month, as a lengthy Lunar New Year holiday combined with ongoing credit tightening dampened housing market activity, data compiled by local land administration offices released on Monday showed. The six cities recorded a total of 10,480 property transfers last month, down 42.5 percent from January and marking the second-lowest monthly level on record, the data showed. “The sharp drop largely reflected seasonal factors and tighter credit conditions,” Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) deputy research manager Chen Chin-ping (陳金萍) said. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday fell in February this year, reducing
Zimbabwe’s ban on raw lithium exports is forcing Chinese miners to rethink their strategy, speeding up plans to process the metal locally instead of shipping it to China’s vast rechargeable battery industry. The country is Africa’s largest lithium producer and has one of the world’s largest reserves, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS). Zimbabwe already banned the export of lithium ore in 2022 and last year announced it would halt exports of lithium concentrates from January next year. However, on Wednesday it imposed the ban with immediate effect, leaving unclear what the lithium mining sector would do in the
RSS