Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶), one of the nation’s leading contract notebook computer manufacturers, said it plans to raise manufacturing prices in the third quarter to help absorb passive component price hikes.
Apart from making laptop computers, Compal has diversified product lines across the PC, smartphone, tablet and LCD TV segments for a number of brand vendors.
The company is negotiating with its brand customers to raise manufacturing prices, as the supply shortage in passive components, especially multilayer ceramic capacitors, is likely to continue until the end of this year, Compal president Ray Chen (陳瑞聰) said after the company’s annual general meeting on Friday last week.
Supplies from passive-component makers at the moment would only allow Compal to meet about 60 percent of orders placed by its customers, Chen said, adding that to fulfill the remaining orders, the company would need to buy more components on the spot market at inflated prices, Chen said.
Already facing slim margins in contract manufacturing, Compal is finding it increasingly difficult to absorb rising manufacturing costs for its customers, Chen said.
Most clients have agreed to the company’s price hikes, beginning from next quarter, he added.
Industry analysts have said they expect further price increases for passive components — such as resistors, capacitors and inductors — in the near future, as an imbalance in the supply and demand of these key electronic parts, which are used in a wide range of electronic devices, might extend into next year.
However, contract electronics maker Inventec Corp (英業達) said it has no plans to raise manufacturing prices, while Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Wistron Corp (緯創) and Pegatron Corp (和碩) declined to comment on the issue, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported on Friday.
This time was supposed to be different. The memorychip sector, famous for its boom-and-bust cycles, had changed its ways. A combination of more disciplined management and new markets for its products — including 5G technology and cloud services — would ensure that companies delivered more predictable earnings. Yet, less than a year after memory companies made such pronouncements, the US$160 billion industry is suffering one of its worst routs ever. There is a glut of the chips sitting in warehouses, customers are cutting orders and product prices have plunged. “The chip industry thought that suppliers were going to have better control,” said
Enimmune Corp (安特羅生技) has obtained marketing approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its EnVAX-A71 vaccine for enterovirus 71 (EV-71), becoming the nation’s first enterovirus vaccine completely made in Taiwan, it said yesterday. After spending 13 years and NT$1.5 billion (US$49.77 million) on the research and development of the vaccine, Enimmune plans to start manufacturing and marketing it by the end of March, the company said in a statement, without disclosing customer order figures. “It is possible that the vaccine would not be included in a national vaccination program initially, and consumers would need to pay for it themselves,” parent
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining
RSS