Largan Precision Co (大立光), a major camera lens supplier for Apple Inc’s iPhones, yesterday reported that net profit last quarter increased 6.79 percent from a year earlier, while gross margin dropped 3.02 percentage points over the same period mainly due to foreign exchange fluctuations.
Net profit increased to NT$7.08 billion (US$231.79 million) compared with NT$6.63 billion in the third quarter last year, the company said.
On a quarterly basis, net profit surged 586 percent from NT$1.03 billion, it said.
Photo: Chen Mei-ying, Taipei Times
Earnings per share rose to NT$53.05 last quarter from NT$49.67 a year earlier and NT$7.73 the previous quarter, it said.
Largan last quarter booked NT$673 million in foreign exchange gains, reversing losses of NT$4.2 billion in the second quarter.
The appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar versus the greenback shaved about 3 percentage points off the company’s gross margin last quarter, when it was 47.2 percent, down from 50.22 percent in the same period last year, Largan chairman Adam Lin (林恩平) told an online investors’ conference.
Increased revenue from bypass shipments — orders delivered directly to module or assembly partners rather than through branded customers — and lower yields also weighed on gross margin last quarter, Lin said.
Largan expects its yields to improve over the remainder of the year, he said.
A better yield would be one of key factors that improves its gross margin this quarter, as most product prices are settled, Lin added.
The scale of front-loaded orders for advanced smartphone lenses among customers, as well as foreign exchange rate fluctuations are also key factors, he said.
Revenue this month is expected to be similar to last month’s NT$6.24 billion, Lin said.
Next month’s revenue would be weaker on a sequential basis, he said.
Largan expects full factory utilization this quarter, as the manufacturing process technology is becoming more complicated, not because of an increase in demand, he said.
Regarding expansion plans, one floor of the firm’s fourth plant at the Taichung Industrial Park (台中工業區) has been set aside, and more capacity can be added if needed, Lin said.
As for progress in shipping Largan’s newly developed high-precision visual recognition products for humanoid service robots, Lin said customers have delayed shipments to next year from this year after scrapping the ultrasonic detection design.
Shipments of other visual recognition products for service robots would take place this year, but in small volumes, he said.
Regarding industry trends, Lin said that customers are continuing to move toward multiple-aperture and variable-aperture lenses, with periscope lenses widely adopted.
As customers have complained that high-end eight-piece plastic lenses are expensive, they would only be used in special applications, he said.
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