Formosa Plastics Corp (FPC, 台塑), the nation’s largest producer of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), yesterday reported that revenue last month rose 29.4 percent year-on-year to NT$19.16 billion (US$652 million) from NT$14.81 billion, the highest annual sales growth among the four major units of Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), thanks to increasing sales volume.
PVC sales volume last month increased by 31,000 tonnes from a year earlier due to fewer working days in the same period last year, FPC chairman and president Jason Lin (林健男) told an earnings conference in Taipei yesterday.
The figure represented monthly growth of 7.2 percent from NT$17.87 billion a month earlier, supported by higher prices of ethylene and propylene, he told reporters.
Five factories will go through regular maintenance this quarter, which is forecast to lower the utilization rate to about 90 percent, compared with 92 percent last quarter, Lin told reporters.
However, global customer demand for plastics is expected to remain robust this year, as US President Donald Trump has announced a US$1.5 trillion investment to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, he added.
The three other main units of the group also posted annual revenue increases for last month.
Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) — Taiwan’s only listed oil refiner — posted revenue of NT$69.42 billion, a 14.6 percent increase from NT$60.55 billion a year earlier and 14.9 percent from NT$60.42 billion the previous month.
Formosa Petrochemical president Tsao Minh (曹明) said he expects oil prices to remain at about US$65 per barrel this year, higher than a previous forecast of US$60, considering OPEC’s ongoing plan to curtail oil production.
Nan Ya Plastics Corp (南亞塑膠), the nation’s largest plastics maker, posted revenue of NT$29.16 billion for last month, representing a 21.5 percent increase from NT$24 billion a year earlier and 4 percent from NT$28.04 billion the previous month, boosted by increasing sales in its electric material segment.
Nan Ya Plastics plans to expand production capacity of copper foil this year to satisfy growing global demand for lithium-ion batteries, Nan Ya Plastics chairman Wu Chia-chau (吳嘉昭) said, without elaborating.
Formosa Chemicals & Fibre Corp (台灣化學纖維), which produces aromatics and styrenics, saw its sales grow 12.4 percent to NT$33.81 billion from NT$30.07 billion a year earlier.
The group last month saw its combined revenue rise 17.1 percent annually and 6.8 percent monthly to NT$151.55 billion.
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