TAIPEI: Siliconware Precision Industrial Co (SPIL), the world’s No. 2 chip packager, posted the best first-quarter net profit in the company’s history, boding well for the year ahead.
SPIL expects the growth momentum to extend into this quarter, bucking the industry’s downtrend.
The company’s revenue is expected to grow to between NT$21.2 billion (US$691 million) and NT$22.4 billion this quarter, up by between 1.83 percent and 7.64 percent from last quarter’s NT$20.81 billion, chairman Bough Lin said.
The forecast is slightly better than the estimate of NT$22.06 billion by JPMorgan analyst Gokul Hariharan.
Lin also expects sequential growth in the third quarter based on the company’s track record.
Building on that optimism, SPIL plans to keep its capital spending budget at NT$14.5 billion, Lin said.
Semiconductor heavyweights Intel Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co earlier this month trimmed their capital spending for the year, saying they expect weaker demand to reduce revenue this quarter.
“Market demand in the communications [segment] will go up in the second quarter and PC demand will go up slightly, driven by gaming PCs. Consumer electronics will also rise slightly, while the memory sector will go down,” Lin said.
Gross margin would grow to between 26.5 percent and 28.5 percent from last quarter’s 26.2 percent, Lin said.
Operating profit margin would also rise to as high as 18.5 percent from 16.7 percent during the same period, he said.
In the first quarter of this year, net income expanded 24.8 percent to NT$2.62 billion, compared with NT$2.09 billion in the same period last year.
Last quarter’s net profit was slightly below Hariharan’s estimates of NT$2.65 billion.
Hariharan downgraded his investment rating on SPIL to “underweight.”
Talking about its new system-in-packaging (SiP) business, Lin said he expected the business to contribute US$10 million in revenue per quarter from next quarter.
SPIL lags behind rival Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc in offering SiP services, which has become a growth driver for ASE, as it has Apple Inc as its top customer.
