Tingyi (Cayman Islands) Holding Corp’s (康師傅控股) Taiwan depositary receipts (TDR) yesterday slid 0.51 percent to NT$19.40 in Taipei trading after the company — the parent of China-based Master Kong Holdings (康師傅) — on Monday confirmed that it was dissolving its Taiwan operations.
Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團), which was involved in a series of food scandals in 2014 and 2015, was in charge of Master Kong’s instant noodle business in Taiwan.
The group’s board of directors has approved a plan to completely withdraw from the Taiwanese market, Ting Hsin’s vice president for public affairs Chia Hsien-der (賈先德) told reporters on Monday.
The dissolution would not affect the company’s TDR trading on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, Chia said.
Master Kong still needs to finish liquidating its assets and to submit an investment withdrawal application to the Investment Commission to complete its dissolution, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said.
A company official, who declined to be named, yesterday said that the China-based instant noodle brand had terminated its production contract with the group’s Wei Chuan Foods Corp (味全食品) after a series of oil safety scandals that sparked a boycott of Ting Hsin food products.
Master Kong stopped distributing its instant noodles in Taiwan in 2015, the official said by telephone.
“Master Kong has no plans to step into the Taiwanese market again in the near term,” he said, citing fierce market competition.
As for its China business, the official said that the company is also facing tough challenges because of weakening demand for instant noodles.
In the first three quarters of last year, Master Kong’s revenue fell 9.44 percent to US$6.91 billion from a year ago and its net profit plunged 37.85 percent to US$213 million.
The Chinese instant noodle industry’s revenue is estimated to have declined by 2 to 3 percent last year, the official 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
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.
Taiwanese manufacturers have a chance to play a key role in the humanoid robot supply chain, Tongtai Machine and Tool Co (東台精機) chairman Yen Jui-hsiung (嚴瑞雄) said yesterday. That is because Taiwanese companies are capable of making key parts needed for humanoid robots to move, such as harmonic drives and planetary gearboxes, Yen said. This ability to produce these key elements could help Taiwanese manufacturers “become part of the US supply chain,” he added. Yen made the remarks a day after Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) are jointly
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) expects its addressable market to grow by a low single-digit percentage this year, lower than the overall foundry industry’s 15 percent expansion and the global semiconductor industry’s 10 percent growth, the contract chipmaker said yesterday after reporting the worst profit in four-and-a-half years in the fourth quarter of last year. Growth would be fueled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers, a moderate recovery in consumer electronics and an increase in semiconductor content, UMC said. “UMC’s goal is to outgrow our addressable market while maintaining our structural profitability,” UMC copresident Jason Wang (王石) told an online earnings
RSS