Chipmaker Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said that its net profit surged to the highest level in five quarters last quarter, as work-from-home and remote learning helped buoy demand for DRAM chips used in PCs and servers.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s growth momentum is expected to extend into this quarter, it said.
Combined with a seasonal uptick in demand for smartphones, TVs and game consoles, DRAM prices and shipments are forecast to at least remain flat this quarter, compared with last quarter, it added.
Photo: Lisa Wang, Taipei Times
“We have seen demand for smartphones and certain consumer electronics show clear seasonal effects in the third quarter,” Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a media briefing in New Taipei City.
In addition, the uptake of 5G applications would continue to fuel demand for networking devices in the second half of the year, Lee said.
While the world’s top three memorychip companies, led by Samsung Electronics Co, have healthy inventories, the pandemic could curtail market demand, as the US, India and other nations are still trying to rein in the spread of COVID-19, he said.
That there are fewer advertisements on Facebook and Google is reducing demand for servers and data centers, and therefore DRAM chips, he added.
The unresolved US-China trade dispute is also dampening demand from certain clients, Lee said.
Nanya has not experienced a direct impact from the US restrictions on exports of technologies developed by US firms to Huawei Technologies Co (華為), he said, adding that the firm is supplying Huawei with memory chips that it designed.
“I am cautiously optimistic about the market outlook in the second half,” Lee said.
The company posted net profit of NT$3.21 billion (US$108.40 million) last quarter, up 66.5 percent from NT$1.93 billion in the first quarter, and a 17 percent increase from NT$2.75 billion in the same period last year.
Earnings per share rose to NT$1.05 last quarter, from NT$0.63 in the previous quarter and NT$0.9 last year.
Gross margin rebounded to 30.6 percent last quarter from 23.8 percent in the first quarter, ending three quarters of decline, which the company attributed to higher chip prices and shipments.
Gross margin was 34.9 percent in the same period last year.
DRAM chips used in PCs and servers generated NT$16.49 billion of revenue last quarter, accounting for 25 percent of total revenue, up from 20 percent in the first quarter.
Nanya said that it is aiming to increase the revenue contribution from DRAM chips used in servers to more than 10 percent by the end of this year, compared with 5 to 7 percent last quarter.
Nanya is planning to almost triple its capital spending to NT$15.76 billion this year, up from NT$5.5 billion last year.
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