The stock price of Macronix International Co (旺宏) yesterday took a nosedive after the memory chipmaker reported its ninth consecutive quarter of losses, dashing the company’s hopes of a turnaround amid a robust recovery in the memorychip industry.
The stock price tumbled by 10 percent, the daily limit, to NT$34.65 yesterday, ending a four-day winning streak and underperforming the TAIEX’s 0.03 percent decline.
Macronix, the world’s biggest supplier of NOR flash memory chips, said its losses narrowed to NT$862 million (US$28.06 million) during the quarter ending Sept. 30 from last quarter’s NT$1.28 billion. However, on an annual basis losses widened from NT$296 million.
Photo: Grace Hung, Taipei Times
That translated into losses of NT$0.47 last quarter, compared with losses per share of NT$0.69 in the prior quarter and NT$0.16 in the same period last year.
“Personally, I am very disappointed about the company’s third-quarter financial results. That significantly fell short of our expectations,” Macronix chairman Miin Wu (吳敏求) told investors on Wednesday.
“I had thought we would have at least been able to eke out a profit in any one month of the third quarter, but we did not make it,” he said.
Wu apologized for the disappointing financial performance and said he would focus on turning around the company within the upcoming year.
He said he would focus on improving the operations of Macronix’s factories and reducing capacity idleness, as well as beefing up digestion of excessive inventories.
As Samsung Electronics Co has exited the low-density embedded multimediacard (eMMC) NAND flash memory chip market and caused supply constraints, Macronix has a good chance to fill the void left in its wake, Wu said, adding that he believes the memory chip market is full of growth potential in the next year or two.
“The current market changes are in favor of us,” Wu said.
Macronix aims to bring its gross margin back to 40 percent in the long term, just as in the past, he said.
Gross margin last quarter weakened to 13.5 percent from 15.6 percent in the second quarter and 28.9 percent in the third quarter last year, company data showed.
Macronix said unfavorable foreign exchange rates were behind the lower margin, along with lower factory usage and excessive inventory.
Revenue rose 21 percent sequentially, or 6 percent annually, to NT$8.21 billion last quarter from NT$6.8 billion.
The NOR flash memory chips accounted for 52 percent, with revenue shrinking 6 percent sequentially last quarter.
The read-only memory chips, primarily used in Nintendo Co’s Switch consoles, made up 26 percent.
The NAND flash memory chips, including eMMC NAND flash memory chips, made up 16 percent of the company’s total revenue last quarter, after surging 44 percent quarter-on-quarter.
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