European chip resistor maker seeking partners in Taiwan

Taipei, Feb. 20, 2004 (CENS)--A European chip resistor manufacturer is reportedly to visit Taiwan to seek partners here for cooperation in sales and production. Local chip resistor makers including Yageo Corp., Ta-I technology Co., and Ral Electronic Corp. are believed possible targets of the European maker.

Japanese manufacturers used to be the most important suppliers of chip resistors in the world. However, Taiwan's chip resistor makers have in recent years played a more and more import role due to their strenuous efforts to upgrade manufacturing technologies and expand the scale of operations.

In the past few years, Europe and Japan saw their currencies experience greater appreciation than the New Taiwan dollar against the U.S. dollar, making it difficult for manufacturers of chip resistors in the two areas to maintain viable operations. For instance, TADO and Kyocera, Japan's two passive component makers decided to close their chip resistor production lines last year to cut operating losses.

Insiders predicted that the two Japanese firms might release contract orders to their Taiwanese counterparts, which are estimated to reach four billion pieces per month. They further pointed out that the manufacturing technology of Taiwan's makers in the line is almost as good as their Japanese counterparts, so there should be no problem for them to take over the volume. As to the manufacturing technology for multi-layer ceramic chip capacitors, they believed, Taiwanese makers still lag behind Japanese counterparts by 9-12 months.

Remko Rosman, Yageo's general manager, said if the two Japanese firms would transfer their orders for chip resistors to Taiwanese makers remains to be seen. However, he observed that some chip resistor makers in both Europe and Japan have recently suspended their expansion projects, but those in Taiwan have actively boosted their production capacity.

Last year Yageo turned out an average of 18 billion pieces of chip resistors per month, and the figure is expected to outstrip 20 billion pieces by the end of the first quarter of this year. As for Ta-I and Ral Electronic, their monthly production volume of chip resistors stands at 8 billion and 5.5 billion pieces, respectively.