Machvision Inc (牧德) yesterday said it hopes to recover business momentum this year as it posted a 34.23 percent annual decline in net income to NT$852.59 million (US$28.28 million) for last year.
Earnings per share came to NT$20.01, down from NT$30.43 in 2018.
Overall revenue fell 18.2 percent to NT$2.54 billion, the automated optical inspection specialist said.
Machvision provides services to printed circuit board (PCB) and integrated circuit manufacturers.
While the trade tensions between the US and China affected the company’s business last year, the decline was mainly due to falling orders from semiconductor companies and chip-on-film packaging specialists in the second half of last year, Machvision president Jasper Chen (陳復生) told an investors’ conference in Taipei.
“We have failed to further establish our presence in overseas markets, such as South Korea, Vietnam and the Southeast Asian region,” Chen said.
The company also suffered delays in the development of new equipment inspection technologies, Chen said.
In order to clinch orders in China amid price competition, Machvision also made sacrifices in gross margin, which contracted from 70 percent in 2018 to 64 percent last year, he said, while operating margin declined from 42 percent to 34 percent over the same period.
Machvision chairman Collin Wang (汪光夏) remained sanguine about business prospects, hoping to achieve a solid performance as it did in 2018.
“We are now readier than ever to welcome growing market demand from 5G rollouts this year,” Wang said, adding that the US-China trade conflict last year had allowed the company extra time to prepare.
“The 5G era is ushering in many opportunities for us,” he said, citing increases in 5G-related products such as substrate-like PCBs and flexible printed circuit board.
He also noted a shift in industry demand for wafer inspection from spot-checking to full-on inspections.
Counting on the company’s newly launched smart cameras to captivate market demand, which performs equipment positioning as well as basic assessments, Wang said he has high hopes for industrial applications in edge computing and artificial intelligence.
“Due to the enormous quantities of data that we need to process nowadays, edge computing can help filter out useless information, which would inevitably become a future trend that our cameras can embody,” he said.
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