Acer Semiconductor Manufacturing Inc will start generating a profit in the second half of this year thanks to upgraded production technology, expanded capacity and steady product prices, says Acer Group chairman Stan Shih. This year will be a turnaround-year for ASMI to say goodbye to two straight years of losses, he said predicting a profit equivalent to $31m from production of both DRAMs and foundry chips. The firm made losses of about $137m last year. Acer has been attempting to reduce its dependency on the commodity memory market, and last year struck a deal to buy logic integrated circuit technology from IBM Corp in order to focus on the system-on-a-chip market.
