Cheng Loong Corp (正隆紙業), the nation’s biggest industrial papermaker, yesterday outlined plans to build a production base in Southeast Asia over the next decade.
“We plan to allocate more than US$1 billon to build a paper mill in Vietnam’s Binh Duong Province,” Cheng Loong president Tsai Tong-ho (蔡東和) told an investors’ conference in Taipei.
The first phase of construction is to be completed in the first half of next year, with an installed annual capacity of 300,000 tonnes of industrial paper products, Cheng Loong said.
Construction of the new facility is to take place in five phases, the company said, adding that the facility is expected to be running at full annual capacity of 1.05 million tonnes in 2030.
The mill would eventually also manufacture household paper products for Southeast Asian clients, Cheng Loong said.
The expansion project comes as the company aims to develop an integrated supply chain in Southeast Asia and grab more market share there, Tsai said.
The mill is to serve as the company’s core production hub in the region, he said, citing the potential zero-tariff benefits brought by Vietnam’s free-trade agreement with other ASEAN members.
Cheng Loong, which entered the Vietnamese market in 2005, operates two paper box plants and one paper processing plant there.
The 57-year-old firm is more cautious about its business in China, primarily due to a dramatic fluctuation in paper prices there and Beijing’s tightening environmental regulations.
Given the circumstances, Cheng Loong said it plans to shut down one of its major units in Shanghai’s Pudong New Area by the end of this year, as potential compliance costs might be much higher in the future.
The dissolution of Shanghai Chung Loong Paper Co Ltd (上海中隆紙業) is expected to have limited effect on Chen Loong’s operations this year, it said.
The company’s 11 other plants in China would continue running as usual, it said.
With the closure, Cheng Loong is planning to sell 8.9 hectares of land in Shanghai, which have a book value of 38 million yuan (US$5.8 million), the company said, without providing a timetable.
Cheng Loong reported that net profit for the first half of the year rose 6.7 percent to NT$698.43 million (US$23.2 million), compared with NT$654.33 million in the same period last year, with earnings per share increasing from NT$0.59 to NT$0.63 in the same period, thanks to rising paper prices and better cost controls.
Revenue in the first six months grew 9 percent annually from NT$19.16 billion to NT$20.8 billion, company data showed.
The company’s stock rose 0.97 percent to close at NT$20.8 on the main board yesterday, outperforming the broader market, which gained 0.25 percent.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
NATURAL PARTNERS: Taiwan and Japan have complementary dominant supply chain positions, are geographically and culturally close, and have similar work ethics Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and other related companies would add ￥11.2 trillion (US$78.31 billion) to Japan’s chipmaking hot spot Kumamoto Prefecture over the next decade, a local bank’s analysis said. Kyushu Financial Group, a lender based in Kumamoto’s capital, almost doubled its projection for the economic impact that the chip sector would bring to the region compared to its estimate a year earlier, a presentation on Thursday said. The bank said that 171 firms had made new investments since November 2021, up from 90 in an earlier analysis. TSMC’s Kumamoto location was once a sleepy farming area, but has undergone
RSS