E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技), the world’s sole supplier of e-paper displays, expects revenue to climb to a four-year high this year as the COVID-19 pandemic helps fuel demand for e-readers and electronic shelf labels during the year-end shopping season.
The Hsinchu-based company said that retailers are accelerating adoption of electronic shelf labels to avoid virus transmission routes as well as to enhance delivery efficiency, as COVID-19 infections remain severe in the US and Europe.
Consumers are buying e-readers, tablet computers and laptops for remote learning or entertainment, instead of other items, as they are confined at home amid the pandemic, E Ink said.
Photo courtesy of E Ink Holdings Inc
The company is to introduce its new colored e-paper displays used in e-readers in the final quarter of this year.
Demand for its new color e-paper displays, dubbed Kaleido, has also improved and the firm is boosting capacity 10-fold, it said.
“This year will be the best year in terms of revenue after the company transformed itself into a pure e-paper display supplier in 2016,” E Ink chairman Johnson Lee (李政昊) told reporters on the sidelines of a news conference in New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋).
“Our order visibility is improving. We are seeing quite good momentum carrying into the first quarter of next year,” Lee said. “There will be year-on-year growth in revenue during the first quarter.”
“Customers are adding new orders constantly,” he said.
To meet customers’ rapidly growing demand for electronic shelf displays, E Ink is also expanding capacities in the US and in Hsinchu.
E Ink’s revenue grew 9.2 percent year-on-year to NT$11.1 billion (US$383.82 million) during the first nine months of this year, from NT$10.17 billion, after revenue last month rose to the highest level in 11 months at NT$1.53 billion.
E-readers and electronic shelf labels are the two major applications that drive demand for its e-paper displays, E Ink said.
E-paper displays for e-readers account for 60 percent of the firm’s revenue, it said.
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