As the LED lighting and backlight industry rebounds, Taiwan’s upstream and downstream LED manufacturers have all expanded to some degree, according to a Commercial Times report. Manufacturers including Everlight, Epistar, Lextar and Harvatek revenue are expected to grow during second half of 2014.

LED chip manufacturer Epistar has acquired the insolvent blue-ray laser disc manufacturer Optodisc’s factory to expand AlInGaP LED production for NT $836 million (US $27.88 million). Epistar aims to initiate the added production capacity by August, which is expected to raise AlInGaP production capacity by 10 percent in 3Q14. Additionally, the company acquired FOREPI’s monthly EPI-wafer production capacity of 350,000 PCS with the recent merge in late June. FOREPI’s annual revenue target is set at NT $7.5 billion, since it will start taking OEM orders from Epistar this month.

Eying the LED lighting market demands, LED package manufacturer Everlight has made a rare move in raising CapEx by more than 70 percent from less than NT $1.0 billion to NT $1.5 billion to NT $1.7 billion. The company’s average utilization rates for 1Q14 was about 85 percent, and has grown to 90 percent in 2Q14. The company is expected to add  500 million PCS production capacity, with production capacity scale expected to reach 4.0 billion PCS by end of this year. 

Vertically integrated LED manufacturer Lextar plans to break the packaging bottleneck by scaling up SMD package manufacturing by 40 percent to 1.4 billion PCS. The production capacity will be initiated this quarter and is expected to contribute to revenues.

LED package manufacturer Harvatek has no plans of making significant expansions, and has made incremental increase in equipment to expand production capacity. The company’s revenue growth for 3Q14 will increase compared to previous quarter, depending on rising demands and whether it can maintain full utilization rates.