E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技), the world’s biggest e-paper display supplier, yesterday said revenue would continue to grow on an annual basis in the first half of the year, as large-scale retailers such as Walmart Inc are accelerating their adoption of electronic shelf labels (ESLs).
E ink said it is seeing rapidly growing demand for ESLs from hypermarkets in Europe, as retailers are motivated to push for store digitalization due to rising labor costs and a shortage of labor.
“We think higher inflation will boost ESL demand. We are seeing stronger demand and more companies are talking about installing ESLs in stores to cope with workforce reductions. Labor costs go up with inflation,” E Ink chairman Johnson Lee (李政昊) told an online investors’ conference in Taipei.
Photo: Chen Mei-ying, Taipei Times
SES-imagotag, an E Ink customer, earlier this month said that it has partnered with Walmart to digitize store shelves in all of the retailer’s outlets.
The company does not expect high inflation to reduce e-reader sales, Lee said, adding that inflation would likely stimulate sales as reading is a relatively inexpensive leisure activity.
“Demand is stronger than we would have imagined,” Lee said. “Demand is not our concern now. Our challenge is to increase the pace at which we’re expanding capacity.”
Revenue in the first two quarters of this year is expected to be higher than the NT$8.49 billion (US$297.36 million) recorded in the same period last year, E Ink chief financial officer Lloyd Chen (陳樂群) said.
Gross margin is also likely to rise in the January-to-June period, as a shortage of key components, such as chips and LCD displays, improved and they became cheaper, Chen said.
Gross margin stood at 45.58 percent in the first half of last year, company data showed.
To handle robust demand, E Ink said it would double capital expenditure to between NT$5 billion and NT$6 billion this year.
E Ink said it would this year launch four new production lines, which would increase capacity by 1.3 to 1.5 times.
The expansion is constrained by longer-than-expected lead times on equipment, it said.
E Ink said it is also in talks with its module partners to study the feasibility of building module assembly lines outside China, because revenue last month fell 5.42 percent year-on-year as COVID-19 restrictions in China closed its factory and its partners’ factories.
To fund capacity expansion, E Ink said it lowered its cash payout ratio this year to about 71 percent from 85 percent last year.
The company’s board of directors has approved the distribution of a cash dividend of NT$3.2 per common share.
E Ink’s earnings per share jumped about 43 percent to NT$4.53 last year, up from NT$3.18 in 2020.
Net profit for the whole of last year increased to NT$5.15 billion from NT$3.6 billion a year earlier.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
RSS