Smartphone lens maker Largan Precision Co (大立光) is to proceed with its expansion plans, despite slowing growth in the global market, Largan chief executive officer Adam Lin (林恩平) told a teleconference with investors yesterday.
The company’s added capacity would be filled as smartphone designs continue to trend toward triple-camera configurations, sustaining demand for lenses, Lin said.
Concurrently, the company’s leading-edge seven-piece lenses began shipping at the end of last year, with many of them being used in triple-camera configurations, he said.
The company would refrain from taking orders with subpar profitability to fill expanded capacity, instead looking for viable opportunities in other high-end applications such as 3D sensing and in-display fingerprint sensing, he said.
“We are not concerned about price erosion,” Lin said.
As more smartphones adopt edge-to-edge screens, the complexity of front-facing camera units is to increase, as the units must also take on 3D sensing duties while conforming to smaller form factors, he said.
In light of slowing smartphone sales, Josephine Huang (黃印嘉), special assistant to Lin, said that the company’s inventory levels are still in a healthy range.
A newly developed product is expected to begin shipping toward the end of this year or early next year, Lin said, adding that the product was not made specific to a single customer and samples have been sent to multiple clients.
Revenue for this month is likely to remain little changed from last month, but is expected to dip next month due to disruptions from the Lunar New Year holiday, Lin said, adding that order cuts as a result of poor sales by its major clients led to the company’s poor showing last quarter.
However, smartphones remain the company’s priority, given the availability of orders for advanced automotive lens products, he said.
In the October-to-December quarter, the company reported net income dropped 22.6 percent quarterly to NT$6.48 billion (US$210.5 million), with revenue falling 23.81 percent to NT$12.44 billion.
Earnings per share (EPS) were NT$48.3 for the quarter, while gross margin fell 1.9 percentage points to 69.44 percent, it said.
For last year as a whole, net income fell 6 percent annually to NT$24.37 billion, with revenue dipping 6 percent to NT$49.95 billion. EPS were NT$181.68, down from NT$193.65 a year earlier, it said.
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
Taiwanese manufacturers have a chance to play a key role in the humanoid robot supply chain, Tongtai Machine and Tool Co (東台精機) chairman Yen Jui-hsiung (嚴瑞雄) said yesterday. That is because Taiwanese companies are capable of making key parts needed for humanoid robots to move, such as harmonic drives and planetary gearboxes, Yen said. This ability to produce these key elements could help Taiwanese manufacturers “become part of the US supply chain,” he added. Yen made the remarks a day after Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) are jointly
MARKET SHIFTS: Exports to the US soared more than 120 percent to almost one quarter, while ASEAN has steadily increased to 18.5 percent on rising tech sales The proportion of Taiwan’s exports directed to China, including Hong Kong, declined by more than 12 percentage points last year compared with its peak in 2020, the Ministry of Finance said on Thursday last week. The decrease reflects the ongoing restructuring of global supply chains, driven by escalating trade tensions between Beijing and Washington. Data compiled by the ministry showed China and Hong Kong accounted for 31.7 percent of Taiwan’s total outbound sales last year, a drop of 12.2 percentage points from a high of 43.9 percent in 2020. In addition to increasing trade conflicts between China and the US, the ministry said
RSS