It is learned from the earnings report recently released by Epistar Corporation that its consolidated revenues in May reached 2.223 billion NTD, a growth of 15.85% over last month, also an annual growth of 19,42%.
In view of the company's operation, Jye Lee who is the Chairman of Epistar Corporation said that the market demand for LED blue chip has started from March, while the demand for LED AlGaInP Chip in the initial stage has been weak, but in May, the market demand for LED AlGaInP chip increased significantly, which has become the main reason for the great growth of monthly revenue. Currently, the utilization rate of Epistar LED blue chip is more than 90%, and the utilization rate of LED AlGaInP chip also grew to 80%.
As its capacity is getting fully used, Epistar starts its production expansion plans in this year. Jye Lee is conservative while taking a view of the performance in Q3, he said that the strong market demand for LED blue chip will continue to October, but the LED backlight is still the main market force, and as the energy-saving preferential subsidy policies in mainland will expire at the end of May, this will affect the follow-up performance of backlighting products in the mainland, which will greatly impact on the revenue performance in the third quarter.
For the gross margin, Jye Lee believes that also because the demand for LED backlight began to decline in the third quarter, Epistar will focus more on the LED lighting business, and as the LED lighting products (such as stage lights, interior lighting, engineering lighting, etc. ) have been widely applied in various fields, so the gross margin of lighting is relatively higher than the average gross margin, so maybe there is no significant growth in revenue in the third quarter, but the gross margin is expected to continue to go up over the season.
