Acer Inc (宏碁) yesterday announced plans to spin off its PC gaming accessories and smart devices businesses into a new wholly owned subsidiary to promote innovation and entrepreneurship within the company and to tap into market segments with higher profit margins.
The new unit, tentatively named Gadget Technology Inc (酷碁), would be the new home of Acer’s expansions into premium PC gaming mice and keyboards, headphones, suitcases and chairs, as well as smart devices, such as prayer beads and air quality monitors, Acer spokesperson Wayne Chang (張鉅靈) told a news conference at the Taiwan Stock Exchange in Taipei.
Sales of peripherals and accessories during the first half of this year are estimated at about NT$300 million (US$9.8 million), he said.
Asked whether Acer intends to let Gadget Technology serve as the company’s internal start-up incubator and if it plans to stage an initial public offering for the unit, Chang said that neither option has been ruled out.
Acer, which bundles accessories to promote PC sales, has not yet decided on whether the unit would be billed Gadget Technology after it begins to operate independently as a subsidiary, he said.
The businesses, which were grouped under Acer’s information technology business unit, are valued at about NT$45 million, Chang said, adding that they are scheduled to be spun off on Sept. 14.
NT$75.66 million in assets and NT$30.66 million in liabilities would be transferred to Gadget Technology, he added.
Boosted by strong sales of PC gaming laptops, Acer yesterday reported that net income in the second quarter rose 24.4 percent to NT$881 million, or earnings per share of NT$0.29, its highest level for the April-to-June period in eight years.
Consolidated revenue in the period totaled NT$58.48 billion, up 9.1 percent from a year earlier.
Gross profit was NT$6.43 billion with a margin of 11 percent, while operating income totaled NT$930 million with a margin of 1.6 percent, the company said.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
KEY SECTOR: Taiwan’s new chip legislation is insufficient, and a more strategic ‘chip act’ that covers the whole semiconductor ecosystem is needed, MediaTek’s chairman said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) yesterday urged the government to formulate a state semiconductor strategy and comprehensive “chip act” that includes local chip designers and smaller-scale semiconductor companies, as they are facing intensifying competition from China. The government is playing an increasingly important role in safeguarding the local semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, given that the US, the EU and Japan are offering hefty subsidies and significant tax incentives to build semiconductor capacity domestically, as they have realized the strategic importance of semiconductors, Tsai said. To implement such a program, the government should take steps to finance a “chip act,” Tsai said
RSS