Local electronics component maker Lite-On Technology Corp (光寶科技) yesterday said it was on track to lift its operating margin in the second half of the year, thanks to rising demand for its main products — such as power supplies — in the traditional high season.
“Our operating margin is improving in the second quarter, helped by better cost control and operation efficiency. We expect the margin to trend up further in the second half of the year,” said Julia Wang (王玉玲), director of Lite-On’s investor and public relations division.
“The first quarter is the trough,” Wang said. “The operation of our subsidiaries and core businesses are trending up this quarter.”
Lite-On made the remarks after reporting disappointing first-quarter earnings in late April.
Wang said the Japanese unit would not be reporting massive foreign exchange losses this quarter after Lite-On booked NT$300 million (US$9.6 milliion) in losses from the unit in the first quarter.
However, Lite-On also said revenues would fall drastically in the fourth quarter after it sells a PC monitor manufacturing unit to local laptop computer maker Wistron Corp (緯創) at the end of this month. The PC monitor unit made up around 45 percent of Lite-On’s overall revenues last year.
To seek further growth, Lite-On is looking into new acquisition deals, Wang said. Lite-On plans to raise more than NT$10 billion later this year by arranging syndicated bank loans to repay debts and to pave the way for new acquisition deals, Wang said.
On April 30, Lite-On told investors that it aimed to lift its operating margin to between 2.3 percent and 2.8 percent helped by rising demand for its power supply and new LED chip packaging business, compared with 2.1 percent in the first three months of the year.
Lite-On is scheduled to release its second quarter earnings and to give its outlook for the third quarter on Aug. 28.
Lite-On made NT$638 million in earnings, or NT$0.3 per share, for the first three months of the year, down 63 percent from NT$1.74 billion, or NT$0.6 a share, in the same period last year.
The company blamed the lackluster earnings results on a fire at a Chinese plant, rising labor costs in Chinese operations, climbing raw material prices and additional spending on employee bonuses.
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said Taiwan’s government plans to set up a business service company in Kyushu, Japan, to help Taiwanese companies operating there. “The company will follow the one-stop service model similar to the science parks we have in Taiwan,” Kuo said. “As each prefecture is providing different conditions, we will establish a new company providing services and helping Taiwanese companies swiftly settle in Japan.” Kuo did not specify the exact location of the planned company but said it would not be in Kumamoto, the Kyushu prefecture in which Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC, 台積電) has a