Passive components maker Yageo Corp (國巨) yesterday said it expects the acquisition of two European sensor companies to add about NT$13 billion (US$403 million) to its revenue next year, helping the company broaden its product offerings to high-end sensors used in automotive and industrial devices.
The sensor market is a new area for Yageo, the company said.
The new acquisitions would also help the company better shield against industrial downturns and economic headwinds, as its premium products are less volatile than standard passive components used in consumer electronics.
Photo: Chang Hui-wen, Taipei Times
“The acquisitions will accelerate Yageo’s expansions into premium markets such as the automotive segment, allowing the company’s operation to better weather downturns,” Yageo chairman Pierre Chen (陳泰銘) told an investors’ conference in Taipei.
High-end products are to account for 80 percent of the company’s total revenue following the transactions, compared with 75 percent currently, Chen said.
Additionally, Yageo this year could hit its target of boosting automotive-related product revenue to 22 percent, one year earlier than expected, he said.
Chen made the remarks after the company last month unveiled plans to acquire German sensor supplier Heraeus Holding GmbH and France-based Schneider Electric’s Telemecanique sensor business for NT$2.84 billion and NT$12.4 billion respectively.
The firm has a good chance to complete the transactions in the first half of next year, he said.
With higher revenue from premium products, Yageo does not expect to experience the significant drop in gross margin seen by its peers, Chen said, adding that local competitors generated more than 90 percent from standard passive components, and saw gross margin dip to just above 10 percent from 30 percent.
“Companies with high exposure to standard products are going to experience a tough time during the next two years,” he said.
The passive component industry is entering into an inventory-driven downward trend, although excessive inventories in supply chains are expected to level off in the second or third quarter of next year, Chen said.
Yageo has been trying to enter the sensor market since 2015, he added.
The company now has grown into the world’s No. 3 maker of passive components through 20 mergers and acquisitions over the past two decades. Revenue expanded to NT$106.54 billion last year, surging 58 percent from 2020.
Yageo operates 42 factories in 28 countries. About 80 percent of its 45,000 employees are based abroad.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS