Taipei, Feb. 20, 2009 (CENS)--Himax Technology Inc. last year raked in revenue totaling US$832.8 million, roughly equal to NT$27.3 billion, unseating Novatek Microelectronics Co., Ltd. as Taiwan`s No.2 IC design house.

Last year, Novatek had revenue of NT$26.1 billion (US$795 million at 2008 exchange rate of US$1:NT$32.8). No. 1 player remained MediaTek Inc.

Himax`s chief executive officer, B.C. Wu, said yesterday in a telephone conference that his company`s sales reached the bottom in the fourth quarter last year and its revenue, gross margin and earnings per share for this quarter to stay on par with those it had last quarter.

He attributed the company`s bright outlook mostly to the Chinese government`s 13% subsidy to rural consumers of house appliances, which is associated with the recent surge of orders to Chi Mei Optoelectronics Corp. for big LCD panels for TVs. Himax is a vendor of integrated-circuit chips for driving the screens partly held by Chi Mei.

Wu estimated the company`s revenue for last month to considerably rise from a month earlier and revenue for this and next months to further grow. He noted demands for LCD panels suddenly plummeted in the fourth quarter last year, hurting demands for the chips.

Last quarter alone, the company had revenue of US$124.3 million, down 53.5% from comparable period of 2007 and losing 46% from a quarter earlier. Its after-tax net income for last quarter was US$4 million, or US$0.02 per share, a recession from US$0.23 it had in the same period of 2007 and US$0.09 per share it made a quarter earlier. Throughout last year, the company had after-tax net income of US$0.49 per share.

In addition to chips for big LCD panels, the company`s major growth drivers include chips for small and medium panels, which rose to 16.7% of the company`s total revenue last year from 2007`s 15.5%; and non LCD ICs, which rose to account for 5.1% of the company`s 2008 revenue from 2007`s 2.6%.


(by Ken Liu)