ChipMOS Technologies Inc (南茂科技), a tester and packager of driver ICs and memory chips, yesterday said that revenue would rise gradually from this quarter, aided by significant improvement in demand for its packaging services used in flat panel drive ICs.
ChipMOS said growth gained momentum last month and would extend into this quarter. The pickup in display drive ICs (DDIC) reflected on a 28 percent sequential expansion in revenue last month to NT$1.84 billion (US$60 million).
“We received a lot of rush orders from customers in the DDIC area lately,” ChipMOS chairman S.J. Cheng (鄭世杰) told a virtual investors’ conference yesterday.
Photo: Yang Chin-cheng, Taipei Times
“Based on the industry’s situation and feedback from customers, the company’s overall operation will start rebounding each quarter from the second quarter,” he said.
Customer wafer inventories stored at ChipMOS’s wafer bank are dropping rapidly and stock must be rebuilt, Cheng said.
ChipMOS said that a rise in demand for flat panels used in vehicles, touch controller-display driver integration ICs and ultra-high-definition organic light-emitting diode displays is driving ChipMOS’s DDIC packaging services during the current quarter.
DDIC packaging services comprised about 52.9 percent of the company’s revenue last quarter, rising 4.2 percentage points from 48.7 percent in the previous quarter, the company’s data showed.
Memory chip testing and packaging services, which accounted for 15 percent of revenue last quarter, is expected to remain flat this quarter, Cheng said.
The recovery is forecast to be slow, likely starting next quarter, he said.
ChipMOS yesterday reported a 30.7 percent quarterly growth in net profit to NT$202.4 million last quarter, compared with NT$154.9 million in the fourth quarter of last year, attributable to an improvement in foreign exchange rates.
Net profit annually plummeted 83.5 percent from NT$1.22 billion, the company said.
Earnings per share rose to NT$0.28 from NT$0.21 a quarter earlier, but fell from NT$1.68 a year earlier.
A lessening of foreign exchange losses helped boost non-operating profit to NT$43.5 million last quarter, reversing a non-operating loss of NT$130 million in the previous quarter, the company said.
Gross margin fell to 12.4 percent last quarter, from 14.5 percent in the fourth quarter last year and 25 percent in the same period of last year.
Separately, memorychip maker Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電) yesterday joined its local competitors in reporting the first quarterly loss in about 11 quarters, as the industry is weathering the inventory correction cycle.
Winbond lost NT$1.01 billion during the quarter ending March 31, compared with net profit of NT$4.56 billion during the same period last year, the company’s filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange showed.
That translated to losses per share of NT$0.25 quarter, compared with net profit per share of NT$1.15 in the first quarter last year.
Gross margin worsened to 27.74 percent last quarter from 48.59 percent a year earlier.
That was the first quarterly loss in about 11 quarters. Winbond said the first quarter would be the worst period for the company in terms of average selling prices and factory utilization.
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