Yageo Corp (國巨), the nation’s biggest supplier of passive components, yesterday reported that net profit for the second quarter of this year was the highest in the past seven quarters.
For the April-to-June quarter, the company’s net profit was NT$5.453 billion (US$166.02 million), up 18.3 percent quarter-on-quarter and 46.6 percent year-on-year, the company said in a regulatory filing.
That represented the firm’s highest profit since the third quarter of 2022, when it made NT$6.402 billion, company data showed.
Photo: Chang Hui-wen, Taipei Times
Earnings per share (EPS) were NT$13.02 last quarter, compared with NT$11.02 the previous quarter and NT$8.9 a year earlier. It was the highest since the third quarter of 2021, when EPS were NT$13.88.
Yageo is the world’s largest manufacturer of chip resistors and tantalum capacitors, and the third-largest manufacturer of multilayer ceramic capacitors and inductors.
The company’s strong earnings came as its revenue rose by 17.4 percent annually to NT$31.418 billion last quarter, the highest ever, while gross margin rose 1.9 percentage points year-on-year to 35.1 percent and operating margin moved up 1.7 percentage points to 20.6 percent.
Net non-operating item gains were NT$923 million last quarter, mainly due to foreign exchange gains of NT$287 million and net interest income of NT$632 million, the company said.
However, accrued tax on undistributed earnings was NT$315 million, which cut the company’s earnings by NT$0.75 per share last quarter, hinting that it could make more money without the levies, Yageo said.
In the first half of this year, net profit expanded 28.1 percent year-on-year to NT$10.062 billion, or EPS of NT$24.04, while cumulative revenue grew 13.4 percent to NT$59.923 billion, the company said.
Gross margin improved 1.4 percentage points to 34.5 percent and operating margin rose 0.2 percentage points to 19.1 percent from a year earlier, it said.
Despite uncertainties such as global inflation and geopolitical conflicts, Yageo said that it is still confident it would achieve stable revenue and profitability growth as customers’ inventories have continuously trended toward healthy levels, while the outlook for artificial intelligence applications is promising.
Revenue, gross margin and operating margin for this quarter are all forecast to grow by a single-digit percentage from last quarter, Yageo chief executive officer David Wang (王淡如) told an online investors’ conference yesterday.
The firm’s capacity utilization rate is expected to rise from 50 percent last quarter to 65 percent this quarter for standard passive components and increase to 75 percent from 70 percent for specialty products, Wang said.
The book-to-bill ratio for the company’s standard and specialty products is forecast to stay at about 1 this quarter, he added.
A ratio of less than 1 indicates falling demand, while a ratio of greater than 1 indicates growth.
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