Memorychip packager and tester Powertech Technology Inc (力成科技) yesterday said that its revenue would slide slightly this quarter, due to sagging demand for chips used in data centers and smartphones.
Unfavorable fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic would cause a “slight setback” to revenue this quarter, compared with last quarter’s NT$19.41 billion (US$656.8 million), Powertech president Hung Chia-yu told investors in a teleconference.
However, revenue this quarter is forecast to surpass the NT$17.71 billion the company made in the third quarter last year, he said.
Photo: Hung Yu-fang, Taipei Times
That would mean the quarter-on-quarter setback would be within 9 percent.
Powertech blamed the forecast for this quarter on weak smartphone sales, as the global economy has not recovered as quickly as expected given the rising number of COVID-19 infections worldwide.
The company said data center operators have also become more cautious about capacity expansion, cutting demand for flash memory used in solid-state drives and system-in-package services.
The company said its equipment loading ratio for its chip packaging service would drop to 75 percent this quarter from 80 percent last quarter, while the utilization ratio for testing services would rise to between 70 and 75 percent this quarter, compared with 70 percent last quarter.
However, Powertech said that it was maintaining its target of posting record-high revenue this year.
“We posted a strong performance for the first half, with revenue hitting a record high, and our customers’ forecasts for the fourth quarter look quite good,” Hung said.
Net profit for last quarter surged 58.2 percent year-on-year to NT$1.75 billion. That represented quarter-on-quarter growth of 6.9 percent from NT$1.63 billion.
The company posted a net profit of NT$3.38 billion for the first six months of the year, up 56.7 percent from NT$2.16 billion in the same period last year. Revenue increased 29.5 percent to NT$38.22 billion.
Gross margin improved to 19.4 percent last quarter from 17.2 percent the previous year, but declined from 19.8 percent in the first quarter.
Demand for replacement 5G smartphones and the installation of more base stations for 5G networks would fuel demand for memory chips in the third quarter, Hung said.
“We believe demand will recover in August or September, as many companies are to launch their new phones, mostly 5G phones, including A [Apple Inc] company and S [Samsung Electronics Co] company, which will give a lift to mobile RAM shipments,” he said.
Powertech is pinning its hopes on increased demand for memory used in graphics chips to mitigate weakness in memory chips for smartphones, while a recovering PC segment, driven by work-from-home and remote education needs, is another bright spot, the company 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
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
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS