Eclat Textile Co (儒鴻) is optimistic about its business outlook this year as it has clear order visibility for the next six months, the garment and fabric supplier said yesterday.
The company said its orders are mostly confirmed for the first half of this year and it has begun to receive new orders for the third quarter.
In addition, the company has seen stronger order growth from mid-sized and high-priced brand clients, it said, adding that the addition of six new customers last year would help contribute about 15 percent to its revenue this year.
Photo: Fang Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
Eclat, which counts global brands such as Nike Inc, Gap Inc, Target Corp, Lululemon Athletica Inc and Under Armour Inc among its top customers, has fabric operations in Taiwan and Vietnam, as well as garment plants in Vietnam, Cambodia, Lesotho, China and Indonesia.
The company said its garment plants have all been running at full capacity, with its outsourced capacity contribution estimated to rise to 30 percent this quarter, from 25 percent last quarter, indicating solid order recovery.
Eclat’s net profit in the fourth quarter last year was NT$1.39 billion (US$44.1 million), up 76.69 percent annually, or earnings per share of NT$5.1.
The increase was buoyed by higher revenue during the October-to-December quarter, which grew 11.3 percent annually to NT$8.49 billion, while gross margin and operating margin improved annually to 32.51 percent and 22.83 percent, respectively, company data showed.
Despite a notable sales recovery and a reversal of declining profit during the final quarter of last year, last year’s overall net profit was still down 23.77 percent annually to NT$5.18 billion and full-year revenue fell 22 percent to NT$30.79 billion due to customers' inventory adjustments.
Earnings per share were NT$18.87 last year, down from NT$24.75 in 2022, but gross margin increased by 3.59 percentage points to 31.44 percent and operating margin rose 1.5 percentage points to 21.28 percent, company data showed.
The increases in margins last year were mainly due to higher factory utilization, better production efficiency, improved product mix and inventories of low-priced raw materials, Eclat vice president for finance and accounting Roger Lo (羅仁傑) said.
Last year, the garment business accounted for 62 percent of the company’s total sales, with the fabric business taking the remaining 38 percent, Eclat vice chairman Richard Wang (王樹文) said.
Looking ahead, Wang said he is not pessimistic about the North American market this year and expects growth momentum to be better than last year, as customers have started to place long-term orders instead of rush orders.
In addition, large brands and channel customers remain active in placing orders, while order momentum from medium-sized brand clients is also quite strong, he said.
The company plans to expand capacity at its Indonesian plants this year and expects new production lines to make a substantial revenue contribution from the second quarter of next year, he added.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by