Acer Inc (宏碁) yesterday reported a net profit of NT$2.74 billion (US$98 million) for last quarter, marking the PC brand’s highest quarterly earnings in a decade.
That represented growth of 391 percent from NT$558 million a year earlier.
On a quarterly basis, net profit jumped about 37 percent from NT$1.99 billion in the fourth quarter of last year.
Photo: CNA
Earnings per share surged to NT$0.91 last quarter from NT$0.18 a year earlier and NT$0.67 the previous quarter.
Consolidated revenue reached NT$71.56 billion in the first quarter, up 46.5 percent year-on-year.
Gross profit was NT$8.31 billion, up 67.9 percent year-on-year.
Operating income was NT$2.81 billion, “with a historically high first-quarter margin of 3.9 percent,” a news release by Acer said.
Continued strong demand for notebook PCs contributed to Acer’s robust first-quarter figures.
The distance-learning market in the US, Europe, Japan and Southeast Asia is going strong, while the company’s first-quarter Chromebook sales grew 141 percent year-on-year, a report by the Chinese language Commercial Times said.
Acer’s investment in e-sports has also paid off, with its e-sports laptops, desktops and monitors growing 87 percent year-on-year, the report said.
Acer also announced yesterday on the Taiwan Stock Exchange that it would be selling 4.6 million shares of its subsidiary Highpoint Service Network Corp (海柏特).
According to the Chinese-
language Web site cnyes.com, Highpoint is planning an initial public offering (IPO) in the fourth quarter of this year.
It aims to list on the emerging market index in the second quarter of next year and move to the Taiwan Stock Exchange in the second quarter of 2023, if everything goes well, cnyes.com said.
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Shares in Taiwan closed at a new high yesterday, the first trading day of the new year, as contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) continued to break records amid an artificial intelligence (AI) boom, dealers said. The TAIEX closed up 386.21 points, or 1.33 percent, at 29,349.81, with turnover totaling NT$648.844 billion (US$20.65 billion). “Judging from a stronger Taiwan dollar against the US dollar, I think foreign institutional investors returned from the holidays and brought funds into the local market,” Concord Securities Co (康和證券) analyst Kerry Huang (黃志祺) said. “Foreign investors just rebuilt their positions with TSMC as their top target,
POTENTIAL demand: Tesla’s chance of reclaiming its leadership in EVs seems uncertain, but breakthrough in full self-driving could help boost sales, an analyst said Chinese auto giant BYD Co (比亞迪) is poised to surpass Tesla Inc as the world’s biggest electric vehicle (EV) company in annual sales. The two groups are expected to soon publish their final figures for this year, and based on sales data so far this year, there is almost no chance the US company led by CEO Elon Musk would retain its leadership position. As of the end of last month, BYD, which also produces hybrid vehicles, had sold 2.07 million EVs. Tesla, for its part, had sold 1.22 million by the end of September. Tesla’s September figures included a one-time boost in