Wan Hai Lines Ltd (萬海航運) has purchased 50,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit containers from China International Marine Containers Ltd (CIMC, 中國國際海運集裝箱) at a cost of US$141.73 million amid a global container shortage, the company said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange on Monday.
The average price of the containers would be US$2,835 per unit, Wan Hai said.
The company expects to receive the containers from the second quarter onward, Wan Hai spokeswoman Laura Su (蘇麗梅) told the Taipei Times by telephone yesterday.
Photo courtesy of Wan Hai Lines Ltd
Most of the new containers would be 40-foot high-cube containers, one of the most commonly used containers for ocean freight, Su said.
“It is difficult to predict when the container shortage would end, although some people expect the shortage to end after the Lunar New Year holiday,” Su said. “We hope to resolve the issue as early as possible with the purchase of new containers.”
The shortage was caused by many containers piling up at ports or being “in the wrong places,” due to congested seaports and reduced personnel amid COVID-19 lockdowns worldwide, Su said.
Therefore, containers have been taking longer returning to their places of origin, which disrupted the logistics chain and caused concerns for Wan Hai’s customers, she said.
The purchase is not a particularly big order for Wan Hai, as the shipper buys new containers with a similar combined capacity every year, Su said.
However, it came earlier than expected, as Wan Hai had bought 37,000 containers in October last year from CIMC for US$109 million, she said, adding that the company has begun taking delivery of some of those containers.
The average age of Wan Hai’s containers is 4.3 years, lower than the global average of 6.6, she said.
The shortage has driven up sea freight rates, which boosted Wan Hai’s revenue last quarter to a record NT$11.6 billion (US$408.31 million), up 75 percent year-on-year.
Wan Hai has a rosy outlook for its orders leading to the Lunar New Year holiday, but the post-holiday outlook remains unclear, Su said.
Wan Hai owned 66 ships and was chartering 39 ships as of Sept. 1 last year.
Intra-Asian routes contributed 70 percent to its total revenue, followed by Middle Eastern and Indian routes with 20.6 percent. The US and South American routes accounted for 5.6 percent and 6.6 percent respectively, company data showed.
POTENTIAL SETBACK: Although Chinese chip designers and foundry firms already have US EDA software, they might be unable to update those programs under new US rules The US’ latest ban on advanced electronic design automation (EDA) software exports to China might hinder Chinese chip companies from accessing advanced semiconductor technology, as they attempt to upgrade to 3-nanometer processes in the next three to five years, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security on Friday announced bans on EDA tools for gate-all-around field-effect transistors (GAAFET), a new-generation semiconductor technology that US chipmaker Intel Corp and Samsung Electronics Co from South Korea are adopting to make 4-nanometer and 3-nanometer chips. The bureau in a statement said that gate-all-around field-effect transistor
WIDENING THE FIELD: Human resources managers must drop prejudices regarding gender, appearance and age to find the best candidates, Micro Technology said The job market for Taiwan’s semiconductor industry remained tight this quarter, as hiring activity slowed from a record high last quarter, a survey released yesterday by online human resource firm 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) showed. Ongoing labor shortages have prompted local semiconductor firms to recruit more women and foreigners in Taiwan and in Southeast Asia, the job bank said. The talent gap in the first quarter reached 35,000 people per month, a surge of 39.8 percent from the same period last year, as the contactless economy and digital transformation shore up demand for semiconductors, 104 Job Bank said in its annual report
POSITIVE CULTURE: Pursuing 12-inch wafers earlier than peers helped TSMC lead the industry, said a former executive, whose main regret was working for SMIC in China Corporate culture at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is what made the chipmaker a leading player in the global industry, a former executive said in an interview with California’s Computer History Museum. “One of the really important reasons that TSMC succeeded” is the culture at the firm, where “if equipment went down at two o’clock in the morning, we just called an equipment engineer,” and the worker would not complain, said former TSMC joint chief operating officer Chiang Shan-yi (蔣尚義). “We didn’t really do anything special, anything great, but we didn’t make any major mistakes,” when compared with competitors, such
Cloud computing equipment company Wiwynn Corp (緯穎科技), which counts Meta Platforms Inc as one of its key customers, is boosting capacity expansion in Malaysia through a new investment of about NT$1.94 billion (US$64.7 million), it said yesterday in a statement filed with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The investment, which aims to help the company with business development and strategic arrangements, would be made through subsidiary Wiwynn Technology Services Malaysia Sdn Bhd to build a new factory, Wiwynn said in the filing. The announcement came about one-and-a-half months after the company started phase II of its new server printed circuit board assembly (PCBA)
RSS