China Steel Chemical Corp (中碳), a subsidiary of steelmaker China Steel Corp (中鋼), yesterday said it plans to triple its mesophase graphite powder capacity this year to meet growing demand for lithium batteries used in electric buses, racing cars and storage systems for wind turbines.
The Kaohsiung-based company plans to expand its mesophase graphite powder capacity to 6,000 tonnes by next quarter from 2,000 tonnes at its factory in Pingtung County’s Fangliao Township (枋寮), allowing customers to verify its products in the second half of this year, it said.
Revenue contribution from carbon materials, including the company’s new mesophase graphite powder business and graphite blocks, is expected to increase from 10 percent of its revenue in January to November last year, China Steel Chemical said.
Photo courtesy of China Steel Chemical Corp
KEY MATERIAL
Mesophase graphite powder is a key raw material for negative electrode material used in lithium batteries.
The company’s products can help boost a battery’s capacity 1.33 times to more than 480 milliampere-hour (mAh) per gram of negative electrode material, from 360mAh, it said.
China Steel Chemical is expanding its graphite crucibles capacity to cope with increasing demand from customers, who use graphite blocks to make graphite crucibles for semiconductor companies to make silicon-carbide chips.
Customers’ lithium batteries are also used in racing cars and supercars, in addition to smart meters and uninterruptible power supply devices, it said.
The company has shipped mesophase graphite powders to customers in the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea and Thailand, it said.
MARGINS
The company’s carbon materials business delivered a lower margin of 19.3 percent compared with the corporate average of 25.4 percent during the first 11 months of last year, with the coal tar business delivering a much higher margin of 34.5 percent.
Overall revenue last year declined 20.48 percent to NT$8.32 billion (US$265.4 million) from NT$10.46 billion in 2022, it said. Pretax profit fell about 16.43 percent to NT$1.73 billion last year, compared with NT$2.07 billion the previous year, company data showed.
The company has an optimistic outlook about petrochemicals and carbon materials this year, it said last month.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS