Touch-screen maker Wintek Technology is trying to move away from Apple Inc. to mushrooms health drink

October 4, 2013 Leave a comment

Oct 3, 2013

Wintek Technology Looks to Mushrooms to Revive Fortune

LORRAINE LUK

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Touch-screen maker Wintek Technology’s wine “Di Di Jin” made from Taiwanese mushrooms is seen in this undated photograph.

Touch-screen maker Wintek Technology is trying to move away from Apple Inc. to mushrooms. Apart from finding new clients in China and Korea, the touch screen maker is making a foray into the health-care food industry.  Early this year, it started selling its first health drink—a wine made from Taiwanese mushrooms that the company says has many health benefits.The Taiwanese company, which once earned the bulk of its revenue from supplying touch screens to Apple, has been working hard to diversify its business after the Cupertino Calif. company switched to an alternative touch-screen technology.Traditional Chinese medicine has used mushrooms for thousands of years to cure all sorts of illnesses. Many Chinese and Taiwanese people believe that some types of mushrooms  can help fight cancer and strengthen the immune system.

A Wintek official said the wine, which has been named “Di Di Jin” or as precious as gold, starts at 5,000 New Taiwan dollars ($170) a bottle. It targets health-conscious consumers on the island.

Wintek said it wants to expand its high-margin, health-care food operation and is developing a herbal drink that can help clear blocked blood vessels.  It didn’t disclose the ingredients or the possible launch date for the new drink.

The company’s efforts to seek new revenue streams comes amid a decline in its core touch-panel business.

Wintek earned more than  50% of its revenue in 2010-2011 from supplying touch screens for Apple’s iPhones and iPads, analysts say. That number is expected to drop to less than 30% this year, they say.

Wintek’s business outlook turned murky after Apple started adopting the so-called in-cell technology in its iPhone 5 from late 2012. This technology integrates touch sensorsin liquid crystal display screens, making it unnecessary to have the separate touch-screen layer that Wintek makes. The absence of the touch-screen layer, usually about half-a-millimeter thick, not only makes the whole screen thinner, but also improves the quality of the displayed images, analysts say.

This year, Wintek also lost component orders for the upcoming iPads, after Apple decided to use film-based touch panels that are thinner and lighter than the glass-based touch panels manufactured by Wintek, according to people familiar with the situation.

Filed under Investing Process, TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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