E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技), the world’s largest e-paper display supplier, yesterday said it expects its revenue and net profit to hit historical highs in the next three years through 2028, fueled by rising uptakes of its new large signage, and robust demand for store shelf labels and electronic readers with color displays.
To cope with growing customer demand, E Ink plans to build a new production line, called H6, to expand capacity for large e-paper displays, such as 30-inch displays for indoor and outdoor signage, the company said.
Multiple production lines are planned, as the company’s board of directors approved a new capacity program totaling NT$3.37 billion (US$107.83 million) for acquiring land and leasing a manufacturing facility in Taoyuan’s Guanyin District (觀音), it said.
Photo: Chen Mei-ying, Taipei Times
“We have a chance to see E Ink’s revenue and profit hit record highs in the next two to three years,” E Ink chairman Johnson Lee (李政昊) told investors via an online conference.
The e-paper displays used in signage would outgrow other business segments next year due to a lower base, Lee said.
E Ink is counting on a new e-paper display production line, dubbed H5, to bring extra growth next year, he said.
“We expect our large-e-paper module factory to be fully utilized next year. The module production line operated by our joint venture with AUO Corp (友達) will also be fully loaded,” Lee said.
The e-paper displays for electronic shelf labels (ESLs) would come next, as the major international retailers in the US, the UK and Europe are increasingly replacing paper labels with ESLs, Lee said.
US tariffs and labor shortages have prompted large-scale retailers to quicken their pace to install ESLs, he said.
This year, E Ink expects to ship 25 percent more ESL e-paper displays to 500 million units, compared with about 370 million last year, Lee said.
The growth would extend into next year, he added.
The company also expects growth from e-paper displays used in e-readers and e-notes, driven by replacement demand for those equipped with color displays.
The integration of artificial intelligence features into those devices is also boosting consumers’ interest, the company said.
E Ink’s revenue grew at an annual rate of 29 percent to NT$29.1 billion in the first three quarters from NT$22.49 billion.
Net profit surged 76 percent to NT$9.4 billion in the first three quarters from NT$5.35 billion in the same period last year, setting an all-time high. That surpassed the NT$8.87 billion the company reported for the whole year of last year.
Earnings per share climbed to NT$8.17 from NT$4.67 over the period, company data showed.
Gross margin rose to 56.44 percent from 47.84 percent a year earlier, according to the data.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS