Shares of E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技) yesterday surged 3.86 percent after the world’s sole e-paper display maker said that some of its customers are willing to pay deposits to secure supply.
E Ink shares yesterday closed at NT$148. Since the beginning of this year, the price has more than tripled from NT$48.5.
The Hsinchu-based company said it is racing to expand capacity, but is still unable to catch up with demand.
Photo courtesy of E Ink Holdings Inc
The company has budgeted NT$2 billion (US$72.1 million) for capital expenditure this year and plans to expand its capital investment to between NT$3 billion and NT$4 billion next year.
“Demand is quite strong, while supply is currently tight,” E Ink chairman Johnson Lee (李政昊) said on Thursday. “It is a challenge to fully satisfy demand. Our capacity has been fully booked for the whole year of next year.”
However, E Ink is cautious about the fallout of the US Federal Reserve’s plan to increase its benchmark interest rates next year and mounting inflation concerns, as those factors could dampen private consumption and undermine demand for electronic products, Lee said.
E Ink plans to build four new production lines, with the first to begin operations by the end of this year, and two more to start production next year.
That would more than double the company’s capacity from the start of this year.
The fourth line is expected to begin production in 2023, the company said.
E Ink attributed the growth momentum to replacement demand for color e-readers and emerging demand for e-notes, which are designed to replace paper notebooks and printed documents as the company’s next-generation color display technology, Kaleido plus, gains traction.
E Ink has added Norwegian e-note vendor reMarkable AS to its client list.
Demand for store shelf labels also soared as more US hypermarket operators and retailers such as Best Buy Co Inc, Walmart Inc and The Home Depot Inc joined their European peers in replacing paper labels with electronic ones.
The COVID-19 pandemic helped boost demand for e-paper displays used as shelf labels as major retailers looked to benefit from the operational efficiency they provide especially when labor became scarce due to pandemic-related restrictions, E Ink president F.Y. Gan (甘豐源) said.
It takes only three hours for hypermarkets with 2,000 outlets to adjust their prices using the labels, compared with two weeks previously, Gan said.
By the end of this year, E Ink expects the number of e-paper displays used in shelf labels to reach 400 million since they first hit the market in 2012, Gan said.
About 60 percent of the shipments would be to the European market, he said.
To better service its customers in Europe, E Ink is planning to establish a new team in the Netherlands probably in 2023 and could expand the unit into a branch office in the longer term, he said.
That would complete E Ink’s global deployment, since it would operate either a branch office or manufacturing facility in Taiwan, China, the US and Europe, he added.
The new European team would be also be helpful in addressing the carbon border tax on imports from non-EU manufacturers, which is expected to take effect in 2026, the company said.
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.
The New Taiwan dollar and Taiwanese stocks surged on signs that trade tensions between the world’s top two economies might start easing and as US tech earnings boosted the outlook of the nation’s semiconductor exports. The NT dollar strengthened as much as 3.8 percent versus the US dollar to 30.815, the biggest intraday gain since January 2011, closing at NT$31.064. The benchmark TAIEX jumped 2.73 percent to outperform the region’s equity gauges. Outlook for global trade improved after China said it is assessing possible trade talks with the US, providing a boost for the nation’s currency and shares. As the NT dollar
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