President Chen Wen-chi of Via said the company hopes to sell between US$300 million and US$500 million of American depositary receipts by June 30. Chen said the company hasn't yet appointed a bank to manage the share sale and he wouldn't name the company that Via may buy.
"We want to establish a US presence and some currency to acquire more technology," Chen said in an interview. "We still want to expand the company into communication" chip design.
Via's shares have surged more than sixfold since they began trading on March 5, 1999, as the company has taken market share away from the world's biggest semiconductor company, Intel Corp, by designing cheaper chips for computers. On Tuesday the stock fell NT$12, or 3.9 percent, to NT$293. Yesterday was a market holiday in Taiwan.
The company's core logic products, chipsets that connect all the components on the motherboard, accounted for nearly a third of all chipsets sold last year, according to Credit Suisse First Boston Inc. Unlike competing products, Via's chipsets work with Intel chips as well as products from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Via is now designing central processing units, the brains of a computer, as well as facilitating the integration of its core logic designs with graphic components on a computer motherboard. Under Chen's leadership, Via is pushing for the acceptance of so- called double data rate as a new, faster memory standard for computers.
Chen said he hopes that Via will begin selling this year a central processing unit with a speed of one gigahertz, slightly slower than Intel's and AMD's latest products. A computer's speed is governed by the rate at which the processor emits electrical pulses. One gigahertz equals one billion cycles per second.
In 1999 Via posted net sales of NT$11.2 billion and net income of NT$1.9 billion. CSFB estimates Via had net earnings of NT$6.8 billion in 2000 and forecasts NT$8.7 billion for this year.
Chen wouldn't comment on the company's profit target, saying only he hopes for sales growth of about 50 percent this year. Via releases its 2000 earnings next month.
"We'll continue to gain more market share this year in the chipset space," Chen said. "We will have much broader and much stronger product offerings."
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