News Article
Fairchild Is Pushing A
Fairchild is pushing a
Amkor has responded angrily to an article that appear on the web on
September 12. Jeff Luth, vice president for corporate communications,
writes:
"Today an article appeared in DigiTimes Taiwan with the headline: 'Amkor
plunges packaging prices 20%'. I have received several inquiries about this
article.
"I will not dignify DigiTimes by referring to today's propaganda piece as
'news'. The truth of the matter is that the article is factually misleading
and blatantly slanderous in its characterisation of Amkor. Perhaps it more
accurately reflects the fact that our Taiwan competitors have been losing a
bit of market share thus far in 2002.
"We do not comment on pricing at the product level. Amkor has over one
thousand package products, each with distinct pricing parameters. I will
note that the pricing environment in Taiwan is often quite different from
other markets. Around 7% of Amkor's business is in Taiwan, and that is
spread over a wide range of package products. Suffice to say that Amkor is
not 'plunging' our package pricing; indeed we believe that overall pricing
has been holding up rather well during the quarter given the sluggish
industry conditions."
Investigation of the offending site reveals an article headed "Amkor said to
cut packaging prices by 20-25% in Taiwan", so apparently Luth's complaint
has been responded to. The article is concerned that price cuts could affect
local competitors, "particularly smaller players". The leading Taiwan
companies (ASE and SPIL) are said to be minimising the impact of the move -
"large customers would not readily disrupt their stable relations with
suppliers".
In addition, the DigiTimes article reports on material from Forbes magazine,
September 16 (this magazine seems to publish before the date on the
masthead). Forbes (Streetwalker section) claims that Amkor has run up a
debt-to-equity ratio of more than 300% in financing expansion. Losses in Q2
were $384mn. For comparison, ASE is given a 52.7% debt-to-equity gearing and
SPIL 106%.
Amkor's Q2 report puts total liabilities on September 30 at $2.294bn and
total stockholder equity at $0.490bn. Long term debt was $1.762bn. Using a
definition of debt-to-equity as being long-term debt/shareholder equity, we
get 3.60 or 360%.