Grand Process Technology Corp (GPTC, 弘塑科技), an advanced chip packaging equipment supplier, yesterday gave a bullish outlook for this year, saying it expects revenue to grow to a record high thanks to increasing customer demand amid new capacity expansion plans.
GPTC supplies a wide range of semiconductor wet processing equipment used in advanced chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging technology, including wet benches, wet cleaning and single wafer set processing systems.
GPTC counts Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) among its major customers.
Photo: Lisa Wang, Taipei Times
TSMC has been expanding CoWoS capacity to satisfy the surging demand for Nvidia Corp’s artificial intelligence (AI) chips, while ASE expanded capacity aggressively this year, because of the AI boom.
“The company has been digesting order backlogs since the second half of last year. We are working around the clock to solve this issue. Revenue this year will certainly grow [over last year],” GPTC chairman Hoton Chang (張鴻泰) said yesterday. “We are optimistic about the full-year business prospects. The second half will be a better period than the first.”
Cumulative revenue soared 51.1 percent year-on-year to NT$2.32 billion (US$78.3 million) during the first five months of this year, after last month’s figure hit a record NT$522 million.
In terms of equipment shipments, GPTC expects to see an annual expansion of more than 10 percent, company president Jao Huang (黃富源) said.
“We are currently discussing new order arrangements with customers. Overall, we are quite positive about ordering, despite US-China trade policies weighing on the external environment,” Huang said.
To cope with strong customer demand, the company plans to double its wet processing equipment capacity this year, GPTC said on the sidelines of the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu County’s Jhubei City (竹北).
GPTC also said it plans to issue new convertible bonds to fund new investments or merger-and-acquisition deals.
To hedge foreign exchange risks, the company is trying to lower its US dollar-denominated assets by encouraging overseas customers to make payments in New Taiwan dollar, yuan or euro, it said.
The new mechanism, which took effect last month, would cut the company’s revenue in US dollar terms from 30 percent to about 10 percent, the company said.
In addition, the company has cut its US-dollar cash position from as high as US$40 million to about US$7 million by converting a large portion of its cash into NT dollars, it said.
Most local companies are facing challenges given the volatility of foreign exchange rates, with the NT dollar appreciating about 10 percent since April, GPTC said.
Shareholders yesterday approved the distribution of a cash dividend of NT$22 per common share. That represented a payout ratio of 75.68 percent based on the company’s earnings per share of NT$29.07 last year.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS