E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技) yesterday announced capacity expansion projects in Taiwan and China, as the world’s biggest e-paper display supplier aims to boost production of e-paper materials and flexible films.
The company plans to invest NT$3.31 billion (US$110.4 million) in Taoyuan’s Guanyin District (觀音) and 3.25 million yuan (US$479,400) at its Chinese facilities in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, it said.
The Hsinchu-based firm said its manufacturing capacity continues to be tight and it is unable to fully satisfy customer demand.
Photo: Chen Mei-ying, Taipei Times
Through 2024, the company plans to spend between NT$5 billion and NT$6 billion each year to fund those projects, it said.
“We are relatively positive about our business outlook,” E Ink chairman Johnson Lee (李政昊) told an online investors’ conference. “With more capacity coming online, we expect the third quarter would be better than the second quarter. The fourth quarter would also be better than the third.”
The anticipated sequential growth in revenue and net profit in the second half of the year comes as the world’s major retailers quicken pace in installing electronic shelf labels (ESLs), offsetting weakening demand for e-reader and e-note products, E Ink said.
Although consumers have turned cautious about spending on consumer electronics, including e-readers and e-notes, in the second half of the year, ESL demand remains strong, Lee said.
The shipments of e-reader modules could be 10 percent lower than E Ink’s estimates for this year, but they would still grow over last year, the company said.
More retailers are adopting ESLs rather than paper price tags to adjust prices automatically, Lee said, adding that ESL replacement demand remained strong.
“The ESL market is entering an organic growth phase. We believe it is still in an early stage of growth,” he said.
E Ink expects the penetration rate of ESLs to surpass 10 percent this year, compared with about 5 percent in the past few years.
The market could reach 30 billion or 40 billion units based on some customers’ calculations, he said.
E Ink posted a record-high net profit of NT$2.37 billion for last quarter, surging 71 percent from NT$1.39 billion a year earlier.
The company said it has seen a significant annual growth in e-reader shipments in the first half of this year.
The company’s first-half net profit expanded 50 percent year-on-year to NT$3.84 billion from NT$2.56 billion, while earnings per share rose to NT$3.36 from NT$2.26 a year earlier.
The US dollar on Friday rose against the euro, but pared gains late in a session that was muddied by quarter-end trading, while riskier commodity-led currencies fell sharply after European inflation hit a record high and US consumer spending increased faster than expected. Although the dollar index was showing its biggest quarterly gain since the first quarter 2015, but was registered its first weekly decline in three weeks. Sterling rose against the dollar after falling earlier in the day. The pound last showed four straight sessions of gains followed by wild declines on concerns about Britain’s plan to slash taxes and pay
SAMSUNG DISTANT SECOND: Top local chip fims served nearly two-thirds of the global market in Q2, while Samsung kept South Korea competitive with its 16.5 percent share Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remained the world’s largest contract chipmaker in the second quarter of the year with a 53.4 percent share of the global pure-play foundry market, the Taipei-based market information advisory firm TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said in a research report on Tuesday. Despite TSMC’s market share dipping slightly from 53.6 percent in the first quarter, it was still far ahead of its rivals, TrendForce said. TSMC continued to benefit from emerging technologies, such as high-performance computing devices, the Internet of Things and automotive electronics, as it posted US$18.15 billion in sales in the second quarter, up 3.5 percent
Moderna Inc has refused to hand over to China the core intellectual property behind the development of its COVID-19 vaccine, leading to a collapse in negotiations on its sale in the country, the Financial Times reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company turned down China’s request to disclose the formula for its mRNA vaccine because of commercial and safety concerns, the newspaper said, citing people involved in negotiations that took place from 2020 to last year, adding that the vaccine maker is still “eager” to sell the product to China. The company had “given up”
PRICE POINT: While overall demand has lagged expectations, higher-priced iPhone 14 Pro models appear to attract more attention than entry-level versions, sources said Apple Inc is backing off plans to increase production of its new iPhones this year after an anticipated surge in demand failed to materialize, people familiar with the matter said. The Cupertino, California-based company has told suppliers to pull back from efforts to increase assembly of the iPhone 14 product family by as many as 6 million units in the second half of this year, said the people, asking not to be named as the plans are not public. Instead, the company would aim to produce 90 million handsets for the period, about the same level as in the second half
RSS