Wiwynn Corp (緯穎) saw its stock price spike 5.85 percent to a six-month high yesterday as investors bet on fast-growing demand for artificial-intelligence (AI) servers and the company’s strong capabilities to increase its gross profit margin from its business.
Wiwynn, which developes and manufactures AI servers, saw its shares close at NT$1,990 yesterday. Gross margin climbed to an all-time high of 11 percent during the final quarter of last year, compared with 9.6 percent in the third quarter and 8.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022, a company statement released on Thursday said.
The company, based in New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止), said that AI servers accounted for 20 percent of its total revenue of NT$58.55 billion (US$1.86 billion) last quarter, doubling from 10 percent in the previous quarter. A higher AI server contribution could be one of the key factors driving Wiwynn’s gross margin in the fourth quarter.
Photo: Fang Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
Wiwynn collected extra non-recurring engineering (NRE) fees for designing and testing new AI servers for clients in addition to manufacturing those servers, leading to an improvement in its gross margin, it said.
Last year as a whole, gross margin rose to an all-time high of 9.4 percent, up 1.2 percentage points from 8.2 percent in 2022, the statement said.
To catch up with customers’ rapidly growing AI server demand in the long term, Wiwynn’s board of directors on Thursday approved a new investment of US$100 million in its Malaysian subsidiary, Wiwynn Technology Service Malaysia Sdn Bhd. The investment would be used to fund the construction of a new factory in the Southeast Asian country.
Wiwynn is building its second factory in Malaysia and expects the factory to start operations in the second half of this year, chief financial officer Harry Chen (陳昌偉) told investors in November last year. The company budgeted NT$5 billion for annual capital expenditure for last year.
“It is a clear and long-term trend and the industry’s consensus that AI server demand will continue to grow. We have witnessed the results of such a trend,” Chen said. “We are also optimistic about the fourth quarter of 2023 and even for 2024. Overall, customers’ demand should rise.”
By the company’s definition, servers equipped with extra AI accelerators, application-specific ICs (ASICs) or graphics processors, are AI servers. AI servers equipped with AI ASICs made up the biggest portion of the company’s total shipments, it said.
Wiwynn said three of its clients have seen their revenue contribution rising to 10 percent during the third quarter last year. The company counts Meta, Microsoft Corp and Amazon Web Services as its major clients, investment consultancy Fortuna Intelligence Co (群馥科技) said in a report.
During the fourth quarter last year, net profit expanded 34.35 percent sequentially to NT$3.52 billion from NT$2.62 billion, the company’s statement said. That represented an annual decline of 10.88 percent from NT$3.95 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Earnings per share rose to NT$20.1 last quarter from NT$14.96 in the third quarter last year, down from NT$22.59 in the fourth quarter of 2022.
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