TPK Holding Co (TPK, 宸鴻), which supplies touch panels for Apple Inc’s Apple Watches and iPads, yesterday posted quarterly losses of NT$618 million (US$19.6 million) for last quarter due to seasonally weak demand, an inventory glut, and customers’ product transitions.
TPK lost NT$1.01 billion in the first quarter. Gross margin fell to 2.1 percent last quarter from 6.5 percent in the second quarter because of a decline in factory utilization, the company said.
TPK said it expected business to pick up this quarter.
TPK chief executive officer Michael Chung (鍾依華) said the company is optimistic about demand for touch sensors, applications for the company’s open-cell touch display solution, fingerprint sensors, curved displays and new devices running on Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 10.
“We believe that pressure sensors [for force touchpanels] will see widespread adoption across the mobile-device market this year,” Chung said.
TPK’s revenue this quarter is expected to grow by 50 percent from last quarter’s NT$23.7 billion, Chung said, adding that gross margin is set to improve to between 2 percent and 6 percent.
TPK is scheduled to begin shipping pressure sensors in the second half and expects the volume to grow significantly next year.
TPK’s forecast of strong growth this quarter contrasts with the outlook for the touchpanel industry as a whole, which Chung expects to remain stagnant due to a lack of game-changing apps and products in the mobile-device market.
TPK said the company’s operating costs shrank to NT$1.62 billion last quarter from the NT$1.81 billion in the first quarter due to organizational restructuring.
Referring to the high expectations for a certain smart watch, Chung said that the wearable device market is still in its infancy in terms of ecosystem and applications, but he is optimistic on the growth potential of the segment, adding that the first-generation iPhone also had a slow start.
Chung said that apart from telling the time and fitness applications such as heart rate monitoring, uses for smart watches might expand to unlocking electronic doors, payment processing and personal security monitoring for children and the disabled.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS