Wiwynn Corp (緯穎), a developer and manufacturer of artificial intelligence (AI) servers, yesterday saw its stock price rally to the highest level in a month after last month reporting its fastest annual revenue growth in more than a year.
Its share price surged by 2.3 percent and closed at NT$2,450 yesterday, the highest level since April 9. Wiwynn narrowed its lag behind Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯), the most expensive stock trading on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Shares of Alchip, an AI chip designer, tumbled by 5.23 percent to NT$2,625 yesterday.
Wiwynn reported 20.79 percent annual growth in revenue for last month, totaling NT$21.96 billion (US$676.52 million), compared with NT$18.18 billion in April last year, a company filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange showed. That represented the fastest annual expansion since March last year.
Photo: Fang Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
For first four months of this year, revenue edged down 0.88 percent to NT$91.59 billion from NT$92.41 billion, the filing showed.
The company’s net profit grew 42.7 percent annually last quarter to NT$4.71 billion. The quarterly earnings set an all-time high and exceeded analysts’ estimates of NT$3.51 billion.
That represented quarterly growth of 33.9 percent from NT$3.52 billion.
Earnings per share were NT$26.92 last quarter, up from NT$18.86 a year earlier and NT$20.1 a quarter earlier.
Gross margin came in at a record high of 11.1 percent, compared with 8.3 percent a year earlier and 11 percent the previous quarter, thanks to revenue contributions from new products, the company said on Tuesday.
Operating margin also climbed to a record high of 8.4 percent last quarter from 6 percent in the same period last year and 7.6 percent in the fourth quarter last year.
Wiwynn said it was optimistic about long-term demand growth in the cloud-based industry and AI servers, and is committed to continue its investments in data center technologies and product development.
It expects AI servers to make up a bigger portion of its total server shipments this year, given an upbeat customer growth forecast, Wiwynn said three months ago. AI servers accounted for 20 percent of the company’s total server shipments in the fourth quarter of last year.
Wiwynn also expects to ship AI servers equipped with graphics processing units from the second half of this year. A majority of AI servers it ships are equipped with application-specific integrated circuits.
To cope with growing demand, the company has made progress in expanding capacity globally.
Its third factory in Mexico had entered mass production last year, as scheduled, the company said on Tuesday. Servers for customers based in North America, Wiwynn’s biggest revenue source, were assembled at the Mexican factory.
Wiwynn is also building a second factory in Malaysia to ramp up production in the second half of this year.
At home, the company is adding a new factory in Tainan, which is set to be a new product development site and a major testing hub.
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