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.
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