Telecom equipment maker Sercomm Corp (中磊) yesterday posted 30 percent annual growth in net income for last quarter as its strategy of building deeper partnerships with telecom operators bore fruit.
Net profit jumped to NT$180 million (US$5.71 million), compared with NT$138 million a year earlier. That translated into earnings per share of NT$0.73, up from NT$0.56.
Gross margin improved to 17.7 percent from 13 percent a year earlier, thanks to robust demand for higher-margin products, such as small cell base stations, enterprise network equipment and mobile Internet-of-Things devices.
In the first half of this year, revenue from telecom operators contributed about 60 percent to its total revenue of NT$13.18 billion, compared with about 47 percent last year.
Sercomm yesterday said it expects revenue to grow by a double-digit percentage sequentially in the second half of this year.
The company has secured a supply contract with Rakuten Mobile Inc to deploy small cell base stations. The Japanese company built a virtual network in suburban Tokyo in February.
“The second half certainly will be a better period than the first half,” Sercomm president James Wang (王煒) said yesterday. “The growth will be substantial.”
Sercomm is seeing increasing demand for its 4G-enabled small cell base stations as customers use them for 5G radio transmission during the early-stage 5G deployment.
The company started shipping products to clients in North America in June and last month, Wang said.
“We withheld broadband device shipments that were originally planned in the first half, because of the US-China trade dispute,” he said.
As Sercomm has ramped up production in a new fab in the Philippines, the company will be able to help customers mitigate costs pressure from US tariffs on Chinese products, he said.
“We cannot entirely count on shipments from China, which would make access to certain markets difficult,” Wang said.
Based on Sercomm’s allocation plan, its Suzhou plant in China would account for a smaller share — 60 percent of the company’s total production this year, compared with 90 percent last year, while its plants in Miaoli County’s Jhunan Township (竹南) and the Philippines would contribute 20 percent each.
Sercomm has doubled the Jhunan plant’s capacity to cope with customer demand and plans to build new manufacturing sites out of China next year to address rising emerging market demand, Wang said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS