Wei Chuan Foods Corp (味全食品) yesterday said it is to invest nearly 600 million yuan (US$88.5 million) building a new plant in China’s Suzhou, as part of efforts to accelerate the firm’s turnaround.
The facility — which is to distribute refrigerated products to customers in the greater Shanghai area — is expected to begin production in the fourth quarter of next year, a company official said by telephone yesterday.
The official, who requested anonymity, said revenue generated by the firm’s plant in China’s Hangzhou has surpassed sales at its Taiwanese plants since last year.
Last year, sales at the Chinese operations made up 53 percent of the company’s total sales of NT$17.1 billion (US$562 million), while sales in Taiwan contributed 45 percent, company data showed.
Overall sales in China reached nearly NT$9 billion last year, a 15.6 percent increase from the previous year, Wei Chuan said.
That figure is forecast to reach NT$10 billion this year in light of growing demand for refrigerated dairy products.
The 64-year-old company’s business strategy to raise revenue contribution from the Chinese market came as it has been the target of a nationwide boycott of its products in Taiwan for the past three years.
Wei Chuan, a major unit of Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團), has suffered from a widespread boycott after its parent company was embroiled in a food safety scandal in 2014 involving the sale of tainted cooking oil at its subsidiaries.
“We will not withdraw from the domestic market,” Wei Chuan chief executive officer Michael Su (蘇守斌) said at the firm’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Taipei on Tuesday.
Over the past three years, the company has continued to invest in improving its food safety standards to win back the public’s trust, Wei Chuan said.
The firm reported a net profit of NT$46.72 million in the first quarter, or earnings per share of NT$0.09, ending 10 consecutive quarters of net losses, while first-quarter sales increased 2.2 percent year-on-year to NT$3.6 billion on improving demand.
However, the company still posted an operating loss of NT$126 million in the first quarter, improving from a loss of NT$533 million in the same period last year.
Shareholders on Tuesday approved a proposal not to distribute a cash dividend this year after the firm posted a net loss of NT$776 million for the whole of last year.
IN GOOD FAITH: Lai said he appreciates Micron’s commitment to Taiwan and that it would continue expanding its investment in the country, while also working with labor President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday called for US memory maker Micron Technology Inc and its workers to negotiate “sincerely” ahead of a possible strike by the company’s union in Taiwan. Last week, a Taiwanese union representing workers at Micron said it had secured authorization from its members to strike over a dispute concerning the company’s bonus scheme, escalating a labor conflict at the chipmaker’s largest manufacturing hub. Micron employs about 15,000 people in Taiwan and has said it invested more than NT$1.6 trillion (US$49.6 billion) in the country. Speaking in Taichung at the opening of a new Micron advanced assembly and testing facility,
China proposed adding advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to its export-control list, potentially restricting overseas transfers of AI models and chip designs in an effort to keep closer control over homegrown advancements in a strategically important sector. The draft proposal covers 23 AI technologies, including large language models, agents, chip designs and computing clusters. Restricted technologies would include model weights and source code for products exceeding certain performance thresholds. Chinese AI startups have this summer made significant progress in closing the gap on US industry leaders. Models such as Moonshot (月之暗面) AI’s Kimi K3 and DeepSeek’s (深度求索) latest editions offer better pricing,
Taiwan should not rule out any energy source or abandon environmental sustainability in favor of ideology and short-term benefits, President William Lai (賴清德) said in an interview, calling for a “professional assessment” of whether nuclear power should be reintroduced into Taiwan’s energy mix. In an online interview with influencer Yu Ting-hao (游庭皓) that aired yesterday, Lai reiterated his position on nuclear power. SHIFT Lai’s remarks marked a shift from the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP’s) longstanding opposition to nuclear power. As premier from 2017 to 2019, Lai pushed for more gas-fired power capacity while sticking to the DPP’s nuclear free homeland ideology and rejected the
CoreWeave Inc has become caught in a tug of war between investors who see rising bond yields as a potential rally killer for the artificial intelligence (AI) trade and those who think demand for computing power will make those concerns seem passe before long. The cloud-computing services provider’s shares plunged 20 percent in the first three sessions of last week, including more than 15 percent on Wednesday, as its debt tumbled to levels that typically indicate distress. On Thursday morning, the cost of protecting CoreWeave bonds against default rose to the highest intraday level on record, while swaps priced in a
RSS