Top Taiwanese LED manufacturer Epistar’s revenue made a turnaround in 2Q17. After the improvement of its product assortment, the capacity of EPISTAR’s blue light LED in Q3 is full. The utilization rate of four-element LED stays above 80%. With the support of AlInGaP LED’s demand in markets such as automotive lighting and security control, the capacity of Epistar will be almost fully-utilized until Q4. The price of its blue LED is likely to remain stable. Epistar doesn’t appear to be involved in the price war in China considering Chinese manufacturers tend to expand capacity to manufacture their own blue LEDs.
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(Image: LEDinside) |
Epistar said that Chinese manufacturers do not expand their capacity all at once. Instead, new capacity will be gradually added with 5-10 new MOCVD machines introduced every month. The company has been keeping its eyes on the price dynamic. According to their observation, not all the new MOCVD machines will be used to manufacture blue LEDs. A part of them will be used for the production of the 2nd and 3rd generation semiconductors. Chinese chip makers show little sign of willingness to reduce prices of their production with knowing that it does not necessarily bring them more orders. Therefore, the price of blue LED will not be much affected.
EPISTAR only purchased three MOCVD machines in the beginning of this year. Its capacity for blue LED is reportedly full. In the peak season Q3, its blue LED supply will mainly target general lighting and LED backlighting markets. In the space of general lighting, the supply will flow to highly efficient LED tubes and LED filaments manufacturing evenly globally without focusing too much on China and emerging markets. As for LED backlighting, since more TV backlighting systems tend to use CSP LEDs, Epistar will also be producing more chip scale packaged blue LEDs, which is expected to contribute to a single-digit percentage of its consolidated revenue of 2017.
The revenue of AlInGaP LED grew at a steady rate, most notably that of the automotive lighting market which soared by 20%.
Epistar finally turned its finance around in Q2 and the EPS stands at NTD 0.69. EPISTAR’s goal is to make the performance of Q3 better than Q2 and it seems very likely to achieve the goal.
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