Advantech Reports FiscalYear 2016 Results

Advantech announced its preliminary results for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2016. The company’s revenue was NT$42 billion ($1.34 billion), up 10.5% year over year. Gross profit was NT$17.11 billion ($546 million), up 11.6% from 2015. Net income was NT$5.868 billion ($187 million), up 10.9% year over year.
 
In US dollar, Applied Computing Group (ACG) was the best-performing business group in 2016 with17% year over year revenues growth, following by Industrial Automation Group (IAG) with 5% year over year revenues growth.
 
“Looking forward at the outlook in the first half of 2017, we expect stable demand in Europe and Greater China, while North-East Asia might continue outperforming. The demand in emerging markets experienced gradually recovery since 2H16. However, the demand is relative milder in North America, which might cause business uncertainty in the first half of 2017.” said Eric Chen, CFO and VP of Advantech.
 
KC Liu, CEO of Advantech, believes that the venture into the industry of the Internet of Things (IoT) have shown that the entire IoT (B2B) business ecosphere may have high potential, but an economy of scale could not be formed due to the dispersion of applications and lack of scale as well as the small quantity, diversity, and highly-customized hardware requirements.
 
For the promotion of the IoT Edge Intelligence PaaS (EI-PaaS) software platform, Liu hopes to integrate Taiwanese institutional energy such as III, ITRI, etc. and establish spin-off companies to focus on the operations of EI-PaaS, which shall provide the industrial IoT cloud service providers with rapid development, deployment and stable operations in cloud platform operations and maintenance services under a monthly subscription model.