Far EasTone Telecommunications Co Ltd (遠傳電信), the nation’s third-largest telecom, said price competition has waned somewhat in the domestic market, after bigger rival Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) scrapped a controversial NT$499 (US$16.79) rate plan for unlimited data usage.
Far EasTone president Yvonne Li (李彬) told a teleconference on Friday last week that “this [NT$499 service plan] is a short-term phenomenon among the big three,” referring to Far EasTone, Chunghwa Telecom and Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大).
“We think that the big three have no intention of initiating a price war in a nearly saturated market,” Li added.
Price competition intensified last month, after Chunghwa extended the service plan to not only civil servants, teachers and military personnel, but also the general public, Li said.
Chunghwa Telecom canceled the plan at the end of last month, but launched new low-tariff programs available to those who sign up online, she said.
As the telecoms are behaving themselves and not making aggressive moves through their retail stores, competition is now back to normal, she added.
To attract new customers, Far EasTone last month teamed up with Line Corp, creator of the Line messaging app, in offering lower-rate Line Mobile services with unlimited data usage.
“This is a new group of users for us, as they are heavily dependent on social media to communicate. They are not heavy users of video streaming, so they do not need a plan that offers a high amount of data,” Li said.
Pricing on the Line Mobile plans is the first in Taiwan to be set according to the plans’ Internet connection speed. For example, subscribers to the NT$299 rate plan would have unlimited data usage at speeds of up to 10 megabits per second, while those who pay NT$399 a month would have speeds of up to 21 megabits per second. Only subscribers to the NT$499 service plan would have full 4G speeds.
Far EasTone reported net profit of NT$2.45 billion for last quarter, matching the company’s forecast of NT$2.4 billion, while earnings per share of NT$0.75 came slightly ahead of its estimate of NT$0.74.
The revenue contribution from new businesses rose to 9.2 percent of total revenue last quarter, from 7.8 percent in the final quarter of last year, with the figure likely to hit 11.8 percent by the end of this year, the company said on Friday.
Far EasTone said it has healthy cash flows and is confident that it will generate about NT$15 billion in free cash flows this year, compared with NT$16.09 billion last year.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by