E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技), the world’s sole e-paper display supplier, yesterday said it expects to continue to grow its business next year as large-scale retailers in the US are joining their European counterparts to install electronic shelf labels (ESLs) as a labor shortage drags on.
Walmart Inc earlier this year announced a plan to adopt ESLs after nearly eight years of evaluations, while Best Buy Co and Home Depot Inc also adopted the cost-efficient electronic labels, following in the footsteps of Carrefour SA and Tesco PLC in Europe.
“We believe E Ink will grow next year, despite the global economy facing rising recession risks... The [revenue] growth might not be as dramatic as this year’s,” E Ink chairman Johnson Lee (李政昊) told a media gathering in Taipei yesterday.
Photo courtesy of E Ink Holdings Inc
If the global economy enters a recession next year, retailers might hesitate about spending on ESLs, the company said.
E Ink’s revenue soared 67 percent year-on-year in the first three quarters of this year to NT$21.52 billion (US$701.3 million), the company’s highest revenue for the period.
More than half of the company’s revenue came from the ESL segment, the first time the business became the firm’s major source of income, E Ink said.
The company’s ESL business is expected to post its fastest growth next year, as large-scale retailers, including Best Buy and Amazon.com Inc are to install the devices, E Ink said.
“We are seeing that more retailers are willing to introduce ESLs extensively,” Lee said. “This year, we are benefiting from wide adoption of ESLs from some European retailers. We have been endeavoring to ship goods there.”
About 600 million ESLs were installed from 2012 to last year, accounting for about 10 percent of the overall market of 6 billion shelf labels, Lee said.
As long as the penetration rate continues to rise, there would be growth opportunities for the company, he said.
There is also replacement demand, Lee said, adding that the lifecycle of an electronic label is seven to eight years.
E-paper displays used in e-notes would be the company’s second growth engine next year, as the world’s top 10 tablet vendors, except Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, have rolled out e-notes, Lee said.
E Ink president F.Y. Gan (甘豐源) said electronic labels used on packing boxes would be the next market with strong growth potential.
Each year, about 10 billion boxes are consumed worldwide, which is a huge number, Lee said.
Like ESLs, Europe would be the first adopter of electronic labels for packing boxes, as the EU stipulates that all such containers must be made reusable by 2030, he said.
Electronic labels can be used to track the usage of such boxes, he added.
This time was supposed to be different. The memorychip sector, famous for its boom-and-bust cycles, had changed its ways. A combination of more disciplined management and new markets for its products — including 5G technology and cloud services — would ensure that companies delivered more predictable earnings. Yet, less than a year after memory companies made such pronouncements, the US$160 billion industry is suffering one of its worst routs ever. There is a glut of the chips sitting in warehouses, customers are cutting orders and product prices have plunged. “The chip industry thought that suppliers were going to have better control,” said
Enimmune Corp (安特羅生技) has obtained marketing approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its EnVAX-A71 vaccine for enterovirus 71 (EV-71), becoming the nation’s first enterovirus vaccine completely made in Taiwan, it said yesterday. After spending 13 years and NT$1.5 billion (US$49.77 million) on the research and development of the vaccine, Enimmune plans to start manufacturing and marketing it by the end of March, the company said in a statement, without disclosing customer order figures. “It is possible that the vaccine would not be included in a national vaccination program initially, and consumers would need to pay for it themselves,” parent
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining
RSS