LED chipmaker Ennostar Inc (富采集團) expects to ship its first pluggable optical modules used in artificial intelligence (AI) server racks as soon as next year to meet customer demand, a company executive said yesterday.
Cloud service providers have increasingly adopted micro LED-based pluggable optical modules or transceivers, given their lower cost and reduced risk, Ennostar Corp (富采光電) chairman Patrick Fan (范進雍) told a media briefing in Taipei.
Ennostar Corp is a major subsidiary of Ennostar Inc, created through the merger of the nation’s two largest LED chipmakers, Epistar Corp (晶元光電) and Lextar Electronics Corp (隆達電子), last year. Lextar was a subsidiary of flat-panel display maker AUO Corp (友達).
Photo: Fang Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
“The adoption of pluggable [optical transceivers] should be faster than most people imagined,” Fan said.
The transceivers are inserted into networking devices such as servers and allow the devices to be connected to fiber optic networks.
“We believe such pluggable [optical transceivers] will be used by electronic system companies in 2027 at the earliest,” he said.
In contrast, micro LED-based co-packaged optics, which integrate optical transceivers with application-specific integrated circuits, enabling lower energy consumption per bit of data transmission, are mostly expected to be commercialized in 2028 or even later, industry researchers have said.
Ennostar Inc expects its turnaround efforts to yield early results this year following deep losses over the past three years, Ennostar Inc chairman Paul Peng (彭?浪) said yesterday.
“The restructuring efforts did have some impact on the company’s profits, but the painful transition is approaching its end. We are ready to sprint,” Peng said, adding that “the company’s balance sheet has returned to a healthy level.”
To ensure sustainable growth and profits, the company is investing in new value-added businesses, including optical transceivers and advanced smart car displays, he said.
The company’s board of directors yesterday approved a capital reduction scheme by canceling 337 million shares to further improve its financial status.
Under the proposed 45.8 percent cut to the company’s capitalization, Ennostar Inc aims to return NT$4.58 in cash per share to shareholders, it said.
Upon completion of the capital reduction, the company’s paid-in capital would drop to about NT$4 billion (US$126 million) from NT$7.38 billion, it added.
Ennostar Inc’s losses widened last year to NT$2.71 billion from NT$1.29 billion in 2024. Losses per share were NT$3.69 last year, compared with NT$1.87 in the previous year.
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