Elevator maker Golden Friends Corp (崇友實業) is to increase product prices by 2 to 3 percent next month to reflect mounting raw material and maintenance costs, unfazed by softening property transactions.
The Taipei-based company, which supplies elevators under the GFC and Genesis brands, and distributes Japan’s Toshiba elevators, on Monday said that the price hikes would add to a cumulative 10 percent increase after two previous adjustments last year for similar reasons.
Golden Friends Corp said at the company’s annual general meeting in Taipei that it is upbeat about its business for the rest of this year with NT$7.8 billion (US$252.26 million) of backlog on hand.
Photo courtesy of Golden Friends Corp
In particular, the company is to benefit from a newly opened mixed-use complex in Taipei’s Dazhi (大直) area, the forthcoming Forward Hotel (馥華酒店) in New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋) and a luxury residential building in Taichung, it said.
The company’s consolidated revenue in the first five months of this year rose by 11.94 percent year-on-year to NT$2.03 billion. Revenue last year increased 2.92 percent to NT$4.74 billion, while net profit increased 8.99 percent to NT$847.81 million, a company record.
The company said new office buildings and urban renewal projects across Taiwan, in addition to the government’s public works projects, would imply demand for new elevators and regular maintenance services.
Golden Friends Corp expects sales of new elevators this year to be flat due to subdued property transactions, it told shareholders.
The company’s maintenance business would grow 3 percent this year, as it has secured contracts to service 41,000 elevators, and the number might rise by another 1,600 to 2,000 by the end of the year, it said.
Its replacement arm is emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic with sales of 310 elevators for the year to last month, compared with 496 for the whole of last year, the company said.
Shareholders on Monday approved a company proposal to distribute a NT$3.4 per share cash dividend based on last year’s earnings per share of NT$4.79.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
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
RSS