YAGEO Corporation (“YAGEO”; 2327.TW) and uPI Semiconductor Corporation (“uPI”;6719.TW) have reached the decision through their respective Boards of Directors today that YAGEO will participate fully in uPI’s private placement for 21 million shares, and Mr. Pierre Chen and his investment company will subscribe to uPI’s convertible bond private placement for 17,000 units.After the transaction, YAGEO will become uPI’s largest single strategic shareholder with 20.23% share. This strategic investment into uPI will further drive YAGEO and uPI to capture higher content share per board through co-development and channel collaborations.
“In a highly competitive electronic world, it is important to offer our customers not only the highest performance products and services but also product breadth. We believe uPI’s strong design capabilities across many different important semiconductor products, especially in its multi-phase VCore (core voltage)controller ICs and its highly integrated power stages, will best complement our existing portfolio. Given the nature of having to work closely with CPU, GPU,and memory for VCore controller ICs and power stages, this strategic investment into uPI will further strengthen our relationships with world leading IC design companies to be even earlier in the customers’ design cycle. In addition, we will be able to provide more value-added products and services to our customers by enhancing our one stop shop model with differentiated products such as power modules and others. This strategic move is another testament to YAGEO’s unique position in the global electronic supply chain with premium channels and strong customer relationships in all the most highly anticipated markets such as AI,high performance computing, industrial and automotive.” said Pierre Chen, the Founder and Chairman of YAGEO.
“The key rationale behind the private placement is to accelerate and to open up more opportunities through leveraging YAGEO’s strengths in its brand and channels in high-end applications like high-performance computing, automotive, industrial,and medical, as well as premium markets like North America, Europe, Japan, and Korea. Additionally, Mr. Pierre Chen’s multinational corporate management experience can further enhance uPI’s strategic planning capabilities, laying a foundation for long-term competitive advantage. Having YAGEO and Mr. Pierre Chen as our strategic partners, uPI and YAGEO together will be able to create and capture more opportunities by providing more value-added products and solutions. The additional capital obtained from the private placement will also provide uPI with more flexibility to look for more immediate opportunities to expand its business and operations to maintain and improve its competitive advantage, and eventually to reach an even more global scale.” uPI’s Chairman S.Y. Hsu cited.
uPI is one of the few power semiconductor design companies whose product portfolio includes both PMICs (Power Management ICs) and Power Discrete components such as MOSFETs. uPI focuses on designing and developing high-density power management solutions and high-performance power components. Its main products include PMICs, Power Stage, Converter, Battery Protection ICs, MOSFETs and GaN solutions. Its end applications cover 5 major platforms—High-Performance Computing,Communication, Battery Protection and Management, Industrial and Consumer. Its VCore controllers and power semiconductor solutions hold a leading market position. With that, uPI has emerged as one of the most prominent analog semiconductor players in Asia and globally.
YAGEO will continue to explore ways to allocate and optimize the resources among its various stakeholders and strategic partners. With its existing leadership in passive components combined with its new sensor portfolio, this strategic step towards power semiconductor is another important milestone to YAGEO’s long-term growth strategy.
