Taiwan PCB Techvest Co (志超) last week said China’s clampdown on toxic emissions would significantly increase its spending on manufacturing equipment and waste-management costs, as well as raise challenges for the firm’s operations in the second half of the year.
The printed circuit board (PCB) maker’s remarks came after Top Faith PCB (Shenzhen) Co (達信電路板) last week announced that it was suspending production, as it could not meet the Chinese government’s emissions requirements.
Top Faith plans to close all of its factories by the end of next month, Chinese-language online news outlet Cnyes.com reported on Wednesday last week.
To cope with tightening environmental protection rules and rising emissions standards, Taiwan PCB Techvest has announced increased spending on recycling and waste-processing equipment through facility upgrades in the coming years, company vice president Rita Hu (胡秀杏) told investors on Thursday last week.
Drastic increases in such spending would pose a challenge for most PCB manufacturers, including Taiwan PCB Techvest, Hu said.
She did not provide detailed figures of the company’s expenses.
The company reported NT$321.13 million (US$10.43 million) in net profit for the first half of the year, up 5.31 percent year-on-year from NT$304.95 million, with earnings per share rising from NT$1.24 to NT$1.31 over the period.
First-half sales rose 4.09 percent annually to NT$11.1 billion from NT$10.66 billion, with gross margin and operating margin falling to 11.85 percent and 4.14 percent respectively from a year earlier, company data showed.
Taiwan PCB Techvest operates five factories in Jiangyin, Suzhou and Wuxi in China’s Jiangsu Province, Zhongshan in Guangdong Province and Suining in Sichuan Province, according to the firm’s Web site.
The company generated about 40 percent of its revenue from products used in LCD panels and 29 percent from those in notebook computers.
The company said China would be a major growth driver, as panelmakers there are rapidly expanding to advanced 10th-generation fabs to expand capacities.
Techvest counts BOE Technology Group (京東方) and China Electronics Panda Crystal Technology Corp (中電熊貓) among its major Chinese customers.
China’s anti-pollution campaign might provide a boon to PCB manufacturers with large-scale capacities, as they might see order transfers from smaller PCB makers unable to afford waste-processing facilities that meet government standards, Hu said.
Taiwanese PCB makers, such as Zhen Ding Technology Holding Ltd (臻鼎), Compeq Manufacturing Co (華通), Unitech Printed Circuit Board Corp (燿華), Unimicron Technology Corp (欣興) and Tripod Technology Corp (健鼎), are expected to be catalyzed by the order-transfer effects due to their advantages in quality, technology and more environmentally friendly production lines, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported.
As China’s environment policies accelerate capacity elimination, PCB makers have negotiated with customers over potential price hikes, the report said.
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
Japanese technology giant Softbank Group Corp said Tuesday it has sold its stake in Nvidia Corp, raising US$5.8 billion to pour into other investments. It also reported its profit nearly tripled in the first half of this fiscal year from a year earlier. Tokyo-based Softbank said it sold the stake in Silicon Vally-based Nvidia last month, a move that reflects its shift in focus to OpenAI, owner of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT. Softbank reported its profit in the April-to-September period soared to about 2.5 trillion yen (about US$13 billion). Its sales for the six month period rose 7.7 percent year-on-year
MORE WEIGHT: The national weighting was raised in one index while holding steady in two others, while several companies rose or fell in prominence MSCI Inc, a global index provider, has raised Taiwan’s weighting in one of its major indices and left the country’s weighting unchanged in two other indices after a regular index review. In a statement released on Thursday, MSCI said it has upgraded Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country World Index by 0.02 percentage points to 2.25 percent, while maintaining the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, the most closely watched by foreign institutional investors, at 20.46 percent. Additionally, the index provider has left Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country Asia ex-Japan Index unchanged at 23.15 percent. The latest index adjustments are to
CRESTING WAVE: Companies are still buying in, but the shivers in the market could be the first signs that the AI wave has peaked and the collapse is upon the world Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported a new monthly record of NT$367.47 billion (US$11.85 billion) in consolidated sales for last month thanks to global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Last month’s figure represented 16.9 percent annual growth, the slowest pace since February last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 11 percent. Cumulative sales in the first 10 months of the year grew 33.8 percent year-on-year to NT$3.13 trillion, a record for the same period in the company’s history. However, the slowing growth in monthly sales last month highlights uncertainty over the sustainability of the AI boom even as
RSS