Catcher Technology Co (可成) suffered a significant drop in its net profit for the first quarter of this year, mainly due to large foreign exchange losses caused by a stronger New Taiwan dollar.
Catcher said on Friday that the fall in its earnings for the January-March period also came because its major clients were in a transition period before launching new models.
Catcher is a metal casing supplier to Apple Inc and its statement echoed comments made by Apple chief executive Tim Cook last week that a delay in consumer purchases resulted from “reports about future products,” which affected iPhone shipments in the first quarter.
Apple’s iPhone shipments in the first quarter totaled 50.8 million units, lower than the market expectation of 52 million units.
Catcher said it posted NT$2.104 billion (US$69.7 million) in net profit for the quarter, down 77.9 percent from the previous quarter and down 49.5 percent from the same period last year, with earnings per share (EPS) at NT$2.71, compared with an EPS at NT$12.37 in the fourth quarter of last year and NT$5.40 in the first quarter last year.
The company said gross margin fell 1 percentage point from a quarter earlier to 49 percent in the first quarter.
Catcher said its non-operating losses amounted to about NT$2.27 billion, mainly from foreign exchange losses, as the NT dollar rose about 6 percent against the US greenback.
It was just one of many Taiwanese export-oriented high tech firms to report foreign exchange losses.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, lost about NT$6 billion, while Largan Precision Co (大立光), a smartphone camera lens supplier to Apple, lost NT$1.14 billion.
Catcher said that the first half of the year is a traditional slow season for it, but momentum is expected to pick up and it expects to bounce back in the second half of the year.
It left its forecast unchanged.
From January through last month, Catcher’s consolidated sales fell 13.8 percent from a year earlier to NT$19.71 billion.
Catcher has decided to expand a factory in Jiangsu Province, China, by investing US$1 billion to buy production equipment to meet future demand.
Analysts said that the investment aims to secure more orders from Apple, which is expected to launch the next generation iPhones in the second half of the year.
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