Unimicron has benefited from the full-load manufacturing capacity of the SLP of ABF and its operations during the first quarter appears to be successful, despite being regarded as the slack season. As viewed, the total revenue in the first five months reached a record-high. Tseng Zi-Zhang, the chairman, said at a recent shareholders meeting that favorable performances can be expected for the trade, as long as it includes businesses related to 5G communications, base stations, servers, and other fields as he observes the current status of the industry. Moreover, the effect of the peak season will remain steady in the second half of the year but it will be exposed to interferences from trade warfare. Hence, operational growth is uncertain. Unimicron also expects this year’s operation to be better than that of last 2018. 

 

As pointed out by institute investors, they consider that the related outlook for the IC substrate is relatively better among all of the other company products. At present, most products are mainly products that are fewer than 12 layers and they are optimistic about the driving force from high-performance computing such as 5G and AI, which are likely to increase the number of layers and expecting to reach 20 layers in the future. As for the rest of the products such as HDI, they have fared relatively weaker in performance as compared to the demands from the same period of previous years and it is yet to be determined whether the momentum of growth can be regained as scheduled.

 

In addition, SLP has been viewed as an increasing trend from mobile-phone customers that find the design of SLP more acceptable. Of those applications outside of mobile phones, the adoption of the relevant design is expected in the future while forming part of the relations that call for concern in the coming days. 

 

In a statement made to the shareholders, Unimicron pointed out that the speed of the global economy and market uncertainty would remain high in view of the prospect for the year 2019 as affected by the Sino-US trade war, with economic growth slowing down. Prismark estimates that the annual growth for the global PCB industry in 2019 is approximately 2.1%. In the second half of the year, business opportunities including 5G, AIOT, big data development, and the integration and optimization of software and hardware in the electronics-related industries along with the start of peak season will help expand innovation and applications and should generate the opportunity for further growth in the PCB industry. In addition, the production capacity at Huangshi and Suzhou will be moderately expanded in the future for the purpose of strengthening process capabilities and removing the bottleneck for substrates, HDI, and rigid-flex PCB. Furthermore, these measures are intended to increase revenue and profit growth in 2019. (News source: Commercial Times)