Contract electronics manufacturer Wistron Corp (緯創) last week said that it plans to purchase land in Vietnam, as the company continues to gradually shift production to Taiwan, India and the Philippines to diversify risk.
The 232,087.74m2 lot the company aims to secure is in the Dong Van III Industrial Zone in Ha Nam Province in northern Vietnam, Wistron said in a regulatory filing.
The transaction would total 337.4 billion dong (US$14.6 million), Wistron said.
The company did not provide additional details on the purchase, which remains subject to approval by the board of directors at a meeting next month.
Wistron, an assembler of Apple Inc’s iPhones, also manufactures notebook computers, PCs, tablets, game consoles, servers, monitors and LCD TVs for clients on a contract basis.
Wistron might build a factory to produce information technology-related products in Vietnam, the Chinese-language United Evening News reported on Wednesday, without citing sources.
The company might initially focus on displays and expand to laptops, the report said.
Credit Suisse Group AG’s equity research team said in a report on Wednesday that Wistron’s latest round of spending in Vietnam is aimed at providing an alternative option for its key US notebook computer clients in the long term, as it aims to start mass production beginning late next year or 2021.
In addition, the Vietnam location might offer better logistics and labor compared with its Philippine site, which could help improve the company’s performance margin in the long term, Credit Suisse said.
Wistron chairman Simon Lin (林憲銘) previously said that, in response to the US-China trade dispute, the electronics industry would shift production out of China to mainly Southeast Asia, but firms would not focus on a certain country or region and it would also be difficult to form industrial clusters such as those in China’s Kunshan or Chongqing.
Wistron also has manufacturing facilities in Mexico and the Czech Republic to support server production, but the company’s production remains largely based in China.
Other Taiwanese contract electronics manufacturers — such as Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), Pegatron Corp (和碩), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) — that have plants in China have also been shifting some of their production to Taiwan, India, Southeast Asia and the US to avoid high US tariffs imposed on products made in China.
Compal, for instance, has completed setting up and expanding capacity in Taiwan and Vietnam to sufficiently meet demand for notebook shipments to the US.
Quanta has focused on Taiwan and Thailand, and Inventec on Taiwan and Malaysia to diversify their supply chains, Credit Suisse said.
With the speed cryptocurrency is emerging as the millennial generation’s alternative asset of choice in India, it is hard to imagine that just two years ago a couple of blockchain pioneers were briefly in police custody. Sathvik Vishwanath and Harish BV, cofounders of a then five-year-old start-up, were arrested in late 2018. No, they had not pulled off a shady initial coin offering. Their “crime” was that they put up a kiosk in a mall in Bangalore where customers could swap bitcoin, ether or ripple for cash or vice versa. That was the whole point of unocoin, their crypto token exchange.
A Chinese factory owned by South Korean semiconductor giant SK Hynix Inc yesterday halted operations after a plant worker was found to have an asymptomatic infection of COVID-19, Xinhua news agency reported. The South Korean worker based at the plant in Chongqing since February had departed on Thursday for South Korea, Xinhua reported. He was tested at Incheon Airport in Seoul and confirmed positive for COVID-19 on Saturday, it reported. All factory staff as well as staff and recent guests at the hotel where the worker lived have been isolated and given nucleic acid tests, the agency said. “We’re cooperating with the local government
FIVE NEW FABS: An acquisition of Siltronic would boost GlobalWafers’ market share from 17 to 30 percent, easily surpassing Japanese rival Sumco’s 25 percent GlobalWafers Inc (環球晶圓) yesterday said it is in final talks to acquire Germany-based Siltronic AG in a 3.75 billion euro (US$4.5 billion) deal, which might help it compete with its closest rival Sumco Corp of Japan. The acquisition would be the fifth for GlobalWafers since 2008, as it has grown to become the world’s No. 3 supplier of silicon wafers through such deals. GlobalWafers, which has a 17 percent market share, would see its market position greatly elevated to 30 percent when combined with Siltronic’s 13 percent, according to a presentation Siltronic gave to its investors at a quarterly conference in August. Sumco
A year of crisis for the lira has kept people in Turkey buying gold at a record pace. Now the appetite for more bullion risks becoming a drag on the currency just as a rally struggles to regain momentum. In the two weeks after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cleared out the leadership ranks blamed for failing to stabilize the lira and draining reserves, Turkish retail investors and firms added US$2.2 billion to their gold holdings, taking them to US$36.4 billion, or almost triple the total last year, Turkish central bank data showed. People are not relenting in their zeal to own
RSS