Chip testing and packaging service provider King Yuan Electronics Co (京元電子) yesterday said it plans to divest its Chinese subsidiary amid heightened geopolitical tensions and a US-China trade dispute that led to a drastic shuffle of the global semiconductor supply chain landscape.
Intensifying competition in the Chinese chip market and changes in the ecosystem also prompted King Yuan to decide to exit China, the company said in a statement.
That decision is part of the company’s long-term growth strategies and financial resource allocations, it said.
Photo: Peng Chien-li, Taipei Times
King Yuan said it would shift its investment to Taiwan to catch up with fast-growing demand for chips used in mobile devices, vehicles, Internet of Things, high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) devices.
The company’s board of directors has approved increasing its capital expenditure this year to NT$12.28 billion (US$377 million), a rise of about 75 percent from an earlier NT$7 billion budget, to satisfy demand for AI and HPC devices. King Yuan is considered a major chip testing service provider to Nvidia Corp’s AI chips.
King Yuan said it plans to sell its 92.16 percent holding of King Long Technology (Suzhou) Ltd (京隆科技) in a 4.885 billion yuan (US$674 million) deal to a number of companies including King Legacy Investments Ltd, Dense Forest Ltd and other Chinese firms.
The deal would bring a NT$16.6 billion capital influx to Taiwan, the firm said.
King Yuan said it plans to use the capital to fund domestic factory and equipment expansion, and to invest in advanced testing equipment and research-and-development efforts.
The Hsinchu-based company said it expects to register a NT$3.83 billion asset gain from the share sale.
The company plans to allocate NT$3.67 billion from the gain to distribute an extra cash dividend of NT$1.5 per share next year and in 2026.
CHIP WAR: The new restrictions are expected to cut off China’s access to Taiwan’s technologies, materials and equipment essential to building AI semiconductors Taiwan has blacklisted Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯), dealing another major blow to the two companies spearheading China’s efforts to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chip technologies. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’ International Trade Administration has included Huawei, SMIC and several of their subsidiaries in an update of its so-called strategic high-tech commodities entity list, the latest version on its Web site showed on Saturday. It did not publicly announce the change. Other entities on the list include organizations such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as companies in China, Iran and elsewhere. Local companies need
CRITICISM: It is generally accepted that the Straits Forum is a CCP ‘united front’ platform, and anyone attending should maintain Taiwan’s dignity, the council said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it deeply regrets that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) echoed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China” principle and “united front” tactics by telling the Straits Forum that Taiwanese yearn for both sides of the Taiwan Strait to move toward “peace” and “integration.” The 17th annual Straits Forum yesterday opened in Xiamen, China, and while the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) local government heads were absent for the first time in 17 years, Ma attended the forum as “former KMT chairperson” and met with Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Huning (王滬寧). Wang
CROSS-STRAIT: The MAC said it barred the Chinese officials from attending an event, because they failed to provide guarantees that Taiwan would be treated with respect The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Friday night defended its decision to bar Chinese officials and tourism representatives from attending a tourism event in Taipei next month, citing the unsafe conditions for Taiwanese in China. The Taipei International Summer Travel Expo, organized by the Taiwan Tourism Exchange Association, is to run from July 18 to 21. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokeswoman Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮) on Friday said that representatives from China’s travel industry were excluded from the expo. The Democratic Progressive Party government is obstructing cross-strait tourism exchange in a vain attempt to ignore the mainstream support for peaceful development
DEFENSE: The US would assist Taiwan in developing a new command and control system, and it would be based on the US-made Link-22, a senior official said The Ministry of National Defense is to propose a special budget to replace the military’s currently fielded command and control system, bolster defensive resilience and acquire more attack drones, a senior defense official said yesterday. The budget would be presented to the legislature in August, the source said on condition of anonymity. Taiwan’s decade-old Syun An (迅安, “Swift Security”) command and control system is a derivative of Lockheed Martin’s Link-16 developed under Washington’s auspices, they said. The Syun An system is difficult to operate, increasingly obsolete and has unresolved problems related to integrating disparate tactical data across the three branches of the military,
RSS