Hsinchu, Taiwan, May 9, 2019 – SAS today announced its revenue for April 2019. On a consolidated basis, revenue for April was NT$5.36 billion, a decrease of 14.7% from March 2019 and a decrease of 6.1% year over year. Revenue for the solar business was NT$0.7 billion, an increase of 13.6% from March 2019 and a decrease of 37.4% year over year.
Accumulated consolidated revenue as of April for 2019 was NT$22.8 billion, an increase of 1.2% from the same period last year.

 

The subsidiary company, GlobalWafers’ revenue for April 2019 was NT$4.65 billion, a decrease of 17.8% from March 2019 and an increase of 1.6% year over year.
GlobalWafers has five factories in Japan. Large drop in shipment due to extended (10 days) golden week holidays is the main reason for revenue decrease. In addition, GlobalWafers long-term agreements (LTA) attainment performance is calculated on a quarterly basis and to meet with the customer’s inventory adjustment, GlobalWafers agrees that the customer has the flexibility to take delivery quantity during each month of the same quarter. Several LTA customers chose to realize Q1 quantity resulting in a large volume pickup by the end of March and a relative decrease in pickup at the beginning of Q2. Consequently this accounts for the main reason why the revenue of GlobalWafers dropped in April compared with that in March. GlobalWafers’ accumulated consolidated revenue as of April this year was NT$20.2 billion, an increase of 9.5% from the same period last year.

 

Though the global semiconductor industry remained under heavy inventory pressure in the first half of 2019, the market demand has stabilized and is expected to recover gradually in the second half only that the latest development of the trade war between USA and China may increase market uncertainty. However with the short-term uncertainty of the global semiconductor market still there, a rapid recovery in the silicon wafer industry is still highly anticipated.