E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技), the world’s sole supplier of e-paper displays, yesterday said that it plans to double its capital expenditure to NT$1.6 billion (US$56.53 million) to expand capacity and catch up with customer demand.
E Ink is building four new production lines in Hsinchu to accelerate its expansion amid significant demand, as retailers have fewer employees due to the COVID-19 pandemic and are seeking the convenience of electronic shelf labels to adjust prices.
This year, the company expects to add new clients from retail areas in Europe and the US.
Photo: Chen Mei-ying, Taipei Times
The Hsinchu-based company last year spent between NT$750 million and NT$800 million on new facilities and manufacturing equipment.
“Order visibility is quite clear. For the whole of this year, we can grow our revenue,” company chief financial officer Lloyd Chen (陳樂群) told a virtual investors’ conference yesterday. “We are not worried about demand... Our capacity is fully booked.”
The company reported that revenue in the first two months of this year surged 77.18 percent to NT$2.92 billion from last year.
On an annual basis, the growth momentum behind electronic shelf labels is expected to increase the company’s revenue in the first two quarters of this year, Chen said.
The launch of E Ink’s new-generation color technology, Kaleido Plus, is driving growth in replacement demand for bigger e-readers and e-notes, he said.
Chen said that the work-from-home and distance-learning trends are stimulating e-reader and e-note demand.
China’s Onyx International Inc (文石) and Europe’s PocketBook International SA have rolled out new e-notes with a stylus and a 7.8-inch color display using E Ink’s Kaleido Plus technology.
However, revenue growth is contingent on the speed of the company’s capacity expansion and the availability of key components, such as display drive ICs, Chen said.
The chip shortage would only have a negligible effect on shipments this quarter, he said.
The company reported that net profit last year rose 16.88 percent to NT$3.6 billion from NT$3.08 billion in 2019, or an increase in earnings per share to NT$3.18 from NT$2.72, while operating profit surged 230 percent to NT$1.85 billion from NT$559.81 million.
Last year’s operating profit approached royalty income (NT$1.89 billion), indicating that E Ink no longer needs to depend on royalties for growth.
E Ink expects royalty income to be stable this year, after sliding 15 percent annually last year.
Gross margin last year improved to 45.7 percent from 44.41 percent, while revenue expanded 13 percent to NT$15.36 billion from NT$13.6 billion.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS