Shortages of key components and raw materials remain Pegatron Corp’s (和碩) greatest challenges, but the situation is expected to ease in the second half of the year, the company said yesterday.
Speaking at the firm’s annual general meeting in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), Pegatron chief executive officer Liao Syh-jang (廖賜政) said that production cannot keep up with orders.
“We’ve been working with customers and suppliers, even using capacity at our subsidiary to help out,” Liao said. “The shortage of components and raw materials is our greatest challenge, but our orders are very strong.”
Photo: CNA
The Apple Inc assembly partner is looking to improve the utilization rate at its factories to alleviate shortages and meet demand, Liao said.
“I believe the situation will improve in the second half of the year from the first half,” he said.
Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have slowed production at Pegatron plants in Malaysia and Vietnam, although the facilities have been operating at least 60 percent of capacity, Liao said.
Pegatron would continue expanding its production capacity worldwide, Liao said.
“In addition to expanding our Taiwanese facilities, Pegatron is looking to increase production in Vietnam, India and North America to prepare for future demand,” he said.
Describing problems to keep up with orders as a “sweet burden,” Pegatron chairman Tung Tzu-hsien (童子賢) said that the company is cautiously considering investments, as it is trying to avoid making hasty decisions to expand amid the current red-hot market situation.
“Our investment decisions need to make sense in the long term. New facilities take 10 years to amortize costs,” Tung said. “We need to carefully evaluate how much of the demand is real, how much of it is transitory and how much of it is not real demand, but the result of panic buying.”
Tung described the electric vehicle (EV) market as “full of future promise.”
“We are still at the initial stage of EV development, but the next 10 years hold exciting developments,” he said. “Pegatron is looking to find reliable clients to approach the EV market together.”
Once Pegatron has established itself in the EV market, the firm’s gross profit should be better than in existing mature or highly competitive sectors, he said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS