Tokyo Electron orders almost tripled
Saturday, July 10, 2010
By Pavel Alpeyev, Bloomberg
TOKYO -- Tokyo Electron Ltd., the world's second-largest maker of semiconductor equipment, said orders for chip and flat-panel manufacturing gear almost tripled last quarter, helped by demand from flash-memory makers in Taiwan.
Order rose to 146 billion yen (US$1.6 billion) in the three months ended June 30, from 50.1 billion yen a year earlier, the Tokyo-based company said in a preliminary statement on its website today. The company will announce definitive figures at its earnings briefing on July 30, it said.
Tokyo Electron forecasts it will return to profit this fiscal year as companies including Samsung Electronics Co. expand factory lines to meet rising demand for personal-computer memory and chips used to store data in portable devices such as Apple Inc.'s iPhone. Global sales of the gear by Japanese manufacturers will rise 71 percent to 1.61 trillion yen in the year to March, the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan forecast yesterday.
Order of chipmaking gear rose to 135 billion yen in the quarter, from 48.7 billion yen a year earlier, the company said. Bookings of flat-panel manufacturing gear jumped to 11 billion yen from 1.4 billion yen, it said.
Tokyo Electron added 0.3 percent to close at 4,915 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange today. The shares have dropped 17 percent this year, compared with a 9.1 percent decline by the benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average |
