Yageo Corp (國巨) yesterday said it plans to acquire a major stake in local power management chip designer uPI Semiconductor Corp (力智電子) for NT$5.31 billion (US$ 164.6 million) at most, the latest in a string of strategic investments in semiconductor firms.
The acquisition would help boost Yageo’s presence in the artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications market, the company said. It would hold a 20.23 percent stake in uPI after a private placement subscription deal is closed, making Yageo the biggest single stakeholder of the chip designer.
The board of directors agreed to purchase 21 million of uPI shares at a maximum price tentatively set at NT$253 each, Yageo’s filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday showed.
Photo: Chang Huei-wen, Taipei Times
Shares of uPI rallied 3.99 percent to close at NT$300 yesterday before the acquisition plan was disclosed.
“We believe uPI’s strong design capabilities across many different important semiconductor products, especially in its multi-phase Vcore [voltage core] controller ICs [integrated circuits] and its highly integrated power stages, will best complement our existing portfolio,” Yageo chairman Pierre Chen (陳泰銘) said yesterday.
“Given the nature of having to work closely with CPU [central processing unit], GPU [graphic processing unit] and memory for Vcore controller ICs and power stages, this strategic investment into uPI will further strengthen our relationships with world-leading IC design companies to be even earlier in the customers’ design cycle,” he said.
uPI specializes in power management ICs and power discrete products such as metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFET). It also develops high-density power management solutions and high-performance power components used in AI-related applications and HPC devices such as servers.
Yageo expects the transaction would create synergies, as its semiconductor subsidiary Advanced Power Electronics Corp (富鼎) is one of the nation’s biggest makers of MOSFET, a device that is widely used for switching and to amplify electronic signals.
“The key rationale behind the private placement is to accelerate and to open up more opportunities through leveraging Yageo’s strengths in its brand and channels in high-end applications like high-performance computing, automotive, industrial and medical, as well as [in] premium markets like North America, Europe, Japan and [South] Korea,” uPI chairman S.Y. Hsu (許先越) said.
uPI reported NT$116 million in net profit for the first quarter, reversing a loss of NT$22 million during the same period last year.
Earnings per share rose from a loss of NT$0.28 in the first quarter last year to NT$1.41 last quarter.
Gross margin rose from 22.7 percent a year earlier to 33.1 percent last quarter.
In a middle-class suburb of Mumbai, workers at Softbank Group Corp-backed Swiggy’s grocery warehouse race against time to deliver orders within 10 minutes. Their speed is tracked by the seconds on a screen that flashes red warnings if they are going too slow. Outside in the sweltering heat, Swiggy’s bikers, sporting the firm’s trademark bright orange T-shirt, frantically collect packed grocery orders to deliver them nearby, while others return to tackle another shipment assigned on their app and waiting. “Ideally, one needs to get done with the entire [pickup] process in 1 minute, 30 seconds,” Swiggy warehouse manager Prateek Salunke said. Swiggy warehouses
European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (ESMC), a subsidiary of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), will hire almost 2,000, from Germany and other European countries, ESMC president Christian Koitzsch said on Monday. At the Taiwan-Europe semiconductor cooperation forum in Berlin, Koitzsch said ESMC would utilize TSMC’s advanced technologies, talent in Europe and good work ethic in Germany to build a world-class talent pool for the semiconductor industry. In August last year, TSMC announced it would team up with Robert Bosch GmbH, Infineon Technologies AG and NXP Semiconductors NV to set up ESMC, in which the Taiwanese partner would hold a
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to invest billions of dollars over the next 15 years to build data centers in Taiwan and create an infrastructure region in the country by early next year, the Amazon.com Inc cloud computing subsidiary said yesterday. The new “AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region” aims to help customers and AWS partners in Taiwan store their content securely and run cloud-enabled workloads with lower latency from data centers in Taiwan, the company said. The project reflects AWS’ long-term commitment to Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific region amid growing demand for cloud services, it said. The move comes as Taiwan has
Lasse Stolley was looking for a change in scenery after a planned apprenticeship fell through. So nearly two years ago the teenager began living on German trains. The epic journey has taken the 17-year-old from a small community in Germany’s windswept far north to the country’s southern borders and beyond. Setting off in August 2022, he has traveled a staggering 650,000 kilometers, the equivalent of going around the Earth more than 15 times, while sitting on trains for more than 6,700 hours. “Being able to decide every day where I want to go is simply great — that’s freedom,” Stolley said in a