Staff Reporter, in HSINCHU COUNTY
Semiconductor equipment manufacturer Skytech Inc (天虹科技) yesterday gave a rosy business outlook for next year on expectations that revenue would grow at least 20 percent year-on-year, thanks to robust demand for advanced chip manufacturing and its new advanced packaging equipment.
The forecast is based on its clear order visibility through the middle of next year, the company said. To satisfy customers’ growing demand, Skytech is expanding its clean room in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口). The new clean room would be one-and-half times larger than the original one, when it is ready by the end of this year, it said.
Photo: Screenshot from Skytech Inc’s Web site
“We are upbeat about the 2025 outlook. We expect to see a similar growth pattern as this year, with a growth rate of more than 20 percent,” Skytech CEO George Yi (易錦良) said yesterday. “We have landed new orders from major chipmakers to supply equipment used in advanced packaging technology that is similar to the chip-on-wafer-on-substrate technology.”
Skytech is shipping physical vapor deposition tools, bonders and de-bonders used in advanced packaging technology, Yi said.
Some products are under customer review in preparation for future shipments, he said.
The company also secured new orders to supply atomic layer deposition equipment, which is used in the front-end chip manufacturing process, Yi said.
During the first 10 months of this year, Skytech’s revenue grew 18.33 percent to NT$1.69 billion (US$51.9 million) from NT$1.43 billion a year earlier. With more revenue coming in later this quarter, the company said revenue would climb to an all-time high this quarter.
Skytech is among a few Taiwanese companies that design and produce key equipment used in the chip manufacturing process. It has a broad customer base that includes Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電).
Semiconductor equipment made up about 50 percent of Skytech’s total revenue, including advanced front-end chip manufacturing equipment and packaging equipment, which accounted for about 20 percent of the firm’s total revenue.
Another half of revenue came from supplying components and parts to chipmakers, chip testing and packaging service providers, and other vendors, the firm said.
During the first three quarters, Skytech’s net profit soared 64.15 percent year-over-year to NT$261 million, from NT$159 million during the same period last year. That translated into earnings per share of NT$3.87, up from NT$2.62 in the same period a year earlier.
As Skytech has a 30-percent exposure to the Chinese market, it is closely monitoring how the geopolitical tension changes. Currently, local semiconductor equipment makers are not subject to any export ban yet.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
France is developing domestic production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries with an eye on industrial independence, but Asian experts are proving key in launching operations. In the Verkor factory outside the northern city of Dunkirk, which was inaugurated on Thursday, foreign specialists, notably from South Korea and Malaysia, are training the local staff. Verkor is the third battery gigafactory to open in northern France in a region that has become known as “Battery Valley.” At the Automotive Energy Supply Corp (AESC) factory near the city of Douai, where production has been under way for several months, Chinese engineers and technicians supervise French recruits. “They
RSS