Pegatron Corp’s (和碩) board of directors has approved a proposal to spend US$150 million to build manufacturing facilities in India, while considering a plant in the US, the company said yesterday.
A factory in India is to begin production in the second half of next year or in 2022, it said.
“This is just the initial investment,” CEO Liao Syh-jang (廖賜政) said. “Due to the COVID-19 situation, it has been harder for Pegatron staff to visit India, resulting in delays.”
Speaking to a virtual investors’ conference, Liao said there is “client demand” for US production as well, and that the possibility is “under investigation.”
“Our clients would like a local production facility in the US,” he said, “we are not ruling it out.”
Pegatron has 11 production facilities worldwide.
“It takes up to a month for goods to arrive in the US from Asia, for example,” he said. “If we had a facility in the US we would be able to provide more timely delivery.”
Pegatron is also going to expand its operations in Vietnam, he said.
Liao said the company would enhance internal labor investigations, after Apple Inc on Monday announced that it had discovered labor violations involving student workers at Pegatron factories in China and that it would freeze new business with the firm until the situation is addressed.
“We have done a lot of internal investigations since this came out. We will not let something like this happen again,” Liao said.
Pegatron also said that third-quarter net profit fell 3.6 percent to NT$6.82 billion (US$236.31 million) from NT$7.07 billion in the second quarter, representing annual growth of 8.3 percent from NT$6.3 billion.
Earnings per share fell to NT$2.61 last quarter from NT$2.71 in the second quarter and NT$2.41 a year earlier.
However, revenue expanded 2.38 percent quarter-on-quarter to NT$335.6 billion from NT$327.84 billion, but declined 5.4 percent annually from NT$354.8 billion.
Gross margin fell to 4.2 percent last quarter from 4.4 percent in the prior quarter, but was an improvement compared with 3.8 percent in the third quarter last year, it said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last