Contract electronics maker Inventec Corp (英業達) is laying off employees at its all-in-one (AIO) computer subsidiary TPV-Inventa Technology Co Ltd (英冠達) and plans to close the subsidiary next year at the earliest, following a drastic decline in orders, a company executive confirmed yesterday.
“We are downsizing at TPV-Inventa and moving all of its operations to Inventec,” Inventec spokesman Yu Chin-pao (游進寶) said by telephone.
Yu’s remarks came after the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported that Inventec is laying off 39 of its 59 remaining staff at TPV-Inventa before the end of this year, leaving only 20 employees at the unit’s financial department to settle the company’s accounts.
The report quoted a former employee, who was recently dismissed by the company, as saying that TPV-Inventa had more than 300 employees at the beginning of last year, but Inventec reallocated 60 of the firm’s headcount to other business units and began laying off workers in the second half of last year.
Inventec dismissed one or two employees at a time and waited for weeks to continue scaling down its head count in an attempt to avoid having to report to labor authorities about a mass layoff, the report said.
Yu declined to disclose the actual number of employees who had left the company, but confirmed that the layoffs were staggered over the past year.
The company plans to dissolve and liquidate TPV-Inventa after resources and employee reallocation is completed, Yu said.
Established in 2000 with a paid-in capital of NT$1.25 billion (US$39.23 million), TPV-Inventa was a joint venture of Inventec and TPV Technology Group (冠捷科技).
Its clients include Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), HP Inc and Dell Inc.
The decision came as a surprise, because it followed a cash injection of US$22 million by Inventec in September last year to increase its shareholding in the AIO subsidiary, while TPV left the joint venture’s board.
TPV-Inventa’s AIO business contributed about 2 percent, or NT$2.23 billion, to Inventec’s consolidated revenue of NT$111.63 billion last quarter, according to company statistics.
However, with its business continuing to fall, “TPV-Inventa is not likely to turn profitable this year,” Yu said, declining to disclose the amount of losses at the subsidiary.
Industry sources told the Taipei Times that TPV-Inventa lost a significant number of AIO PC orders from Lenovo this year, after the Chinese company reallocated orders for 1.2 million units to Asia Vital Components Co Ltd (奇鋐) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶).
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) quarterly sales topped estimates, reinforcing investor hopes that the torrid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware spending would extend into this year. The go-to chipmaker for Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc reported a 39 percent rise in December-quarter revenue to NT$868.5 billion (US$26.35 billion), based on calculations from monthly disclosures. That compared with an average estimate of NT$854.7 billion. The strong showing from Taiwan’s largest company bolsters expectations that big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Microsoft Corp would continue to build and upgrade datacenters at a rapid clip to propel AI development. Growth accelerated for
RSS