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.
China’s chip industry is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, after US sanctions on local champions — from Huawei Technologies Co (華為) to Hikvision Digital Technology Co (海康威視) — spurred appetite for homegrown components. Nineteen of the world’s 20 fastest-growing chip industry firms over the past four quarters, on average, hail from the world’s No. 2 economy, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. That compared with just eight firms at the same point last year. Revenue at China-based suppliers of design software, processors and gear vital to chipmaking is increasing at several times the pace of global leaders Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co
POSITIVE SIGNS: GlobalWafers has continued to sign long-term supply agreements, most of which exceed 2028, and aside from one factory, it is running at full capacity GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s third-largest silicon wafer maker, yesterday said that Samsung Electronics Co and most of its customers have not scaled back on orders, or delayed shipments, even though consumer spending has shifted away from smartphones and notebook computers due to mounting inflation pressures. Rising inflation has altered consumers’ spending habits, dampening sales of consumer electronics, the Hsinchu-based company said. However, customers all honored their supply agreements by adjusting their product mix and shifting to applications that are still reporting robust growth, it said. Aside from one 6-inch factory, GlobalWafers’ 15 factories around the world are running at 100 percent
HEAVY LOAD: CAL’s new baggage weight allowance is based on the type of airfare a passenger bought, while EVA’s would be available to all economy-class passengers China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) is to increase its free baggage allowance by 10kg for passengers flying to Europe, Australia or New Zealand, while lowering its fee for luggage exceeding the free weight limit, it said yesterday. The move is the airline’s latest effort to attract passengers, after local rival EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空) late last month announced that from Thursday it would increase its free baggage weight allowance for all passengers. For economy-class passengers who fly to destinations other than the US and Canada, CAL currently has three weight limits for free baggage based on the airfare — 20kg for “discount”
Nearly a quarter of European companies in China are considering shifting their investments out of the country as COVID-19 outbreaks and lockdowns dim the outlook for the world’s second-largest economy, a survey showed. About 23 percent of the businesses that responded to the survey are thinking of moving their current or planned investments away from China, a report released yesterday by the EU Chamber of Commerce in China said. The survey was conducted at the end of April, when Shanghai was still in shut down and restrictions in places like Jilin Province disrupted business activity. The number of European firms reassessing