Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent.
The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology.
The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference.
Photo: Screen grab from Faraday Technology Corp’s Web site
“The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win customers’ projects to design more than 10 chips,” Wang said. “In terms of FinFet [fin field-effect transistor] chip design, we won three projects in the second quarter, surpassing two chips as we had thought.”
That should boost the company’s non-recurring engineering (NRE) revenue to an all-time high this quarter and this year, Faraday said.
Revenue as a whole is expected to surge to about NT$20 billion (US$615.42 million) this year, compared with NT$11.06 billion last year, Wang said.
Despite US tariff policies and a tense trade dispute between the US and China, the world’s two largest economies, Faraday said it had no plans to adjust its revenue growth projection this year.
“The risk is low as the technologies we offer are mostly for niche applications such as smart meters, networking devices or switches,” Wang said. “Besides, we are exploring business opportunities outside of China. So far, we have new design-win [projects] from Europe and Japan.”
Faraday has low US exposure with chips shipped to the US, accounting for 5 to 10 percent of its total revenue last year, he said.
China accounted for 30 to 40 percent, but a majority of the chips were for China’s domestic market, he said.
The company did not have any direct or indirect business ties with China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為), Faraday said.
Meanwhile, Faraday reiterated that it did not contravene a US export ban by supplying chips containing Samsung Electronics Co’s high-bandwidth memory (HBM) technology, denying a SemiAnalysis report last week that said Chinese companies can recover the HBM-2E unit by desoldering or extracting them from the package.
HBM technology is a key component in building artificial intelligence (AI) chips.
It is impossible to recover an HBM unit through desoldering, given the complexity of the technology, Wang said.
Faraday sourced Samsung’s HBM-2E chips on behalf of its customers and it acquired a large chunk of the chips last quarter as Samsung planned to replace them with advanced HBM-3 or HBM-4 chips, he said.
Faraday’s net profit last quarter rose 46.6 percent quarterly and 23.5 percent annually to NT$346 million. Earnings per share were NT$1.33, compared with NT$0.91 in the previous quarter and NT$1.13 a year earlier.
Gross margin fell to 20.3 percent, from 42.8 percent the previous quarter and 46.5 percent a year earlier, but the figure is expected to rebound to about 30 percent by the end of this year, thanks to higher revenue contribution from its NRE and intellectual property businesses, Wang said.
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