E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技) yesterday said it would further expand capacity to cope with robust demand for e-paper displays used in e-readers, e-notes and electronic shelf labels, as the COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation have not dampened consumer demand.
Although rising inflation is weakening companies’ purchasing power, E Ink said that its customers have not scaled down orders for e-paper displays used in e-readers.
“Reading is still the most affordable leisure activity that people have,” E Ink CEO Johnson Lee (李政昊) told an online investors’ conference in Taipei.
Photo: Chen Mei-ying, Taipei Times
As e-books are less expensive than paper books, “we have so far not seen a slowdown in demand,” Lee said. “We are seeing quite robust demand.”
Demand was also aided by E Ink’s launch of better-performing colored e-paper display technologies to replace e-readers with monochromatic displays, Lee said.
Large-scale retailers are more rapidly adopting electronic labels due to price volatility and inflation, as well as higher labor costs and worker shortages, he said.
E-papers used in electronic labels, which replaced those used in e-readers, became E Ink’s biggest revenue contributor last quarter, accounting for 52 percent of the company’s total revenue of NT$5.96 billion (US$200.61 million), the company said, adding that this was a significant increase from 40 percent a year earlier.
To meet demand, E Ink said that it would double this year’s capital expenditure to more than NT$4 billion.
The firm is to launch three new production lines for e-paper displays this year, Lee said, adding that another new production line would be postponed until the first quarter of next year because delivery of the equipment had been delayed.
To boost production, E Ink might convert part of a new office building into a manufacturing site, he said.
The office building is to open next year, he added.
Lee said that the impact from COVID-19 lockdowns in China has been negligible.
The large-scale shutdowns in Shanghai did not spread to Jiangsu Province’s Yangzhou, where E Ink operates an e-paper display module factory, he said.
Transportation snarls have elevated logistics costs, but that is manageable, he said.
E Ink reported that net profit in the first quarter increased 25 percent year-on-year to NT$1.46 billion — the second-highest in the company’s history — compared with NT$1.17 billion a year earlier, while earnings per share rose to NT$1.28 from NT$1.03 a year earlier.
Operating profit margin jumped to 24 percent, from 22 percent a year earlier.
Gross margin this quarter is likely to decline, as shipments of lower-margin e-reader modules would increase ahead of the peak season in the third quarter, the company said.
Revenue in the first quarter rose 14 percent annually to NT$5.96 billion, the highest in 11 years, it said.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) forecast that its wafer shipments this quarter would grow up to 7 percent sequentially and the factory utilization rate would rise to 75 percent, indicating that customers did not alter their ordering behavior due to the US President Donald Trump’s capricious US tariff policies. However, the uncertainty about US tariffs has weighed on the chipmaker’s business visibility for the second half of this year, UMC chief financial officer Liu Chi-tung (劉啟東) said at an online earnings conference yesterday. “Although the escalating trade tensions and global tariff policies have increased uncertainty in the semiconductor industry, we have not
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
RSS