(Yicai) Oct. 30 -- E-Town Semiconductor Technology, a leading Chinese semiconductor equipment firm, has announced strong earnings for the third quarter of the year and a CNY1.8 billion (USD270.4 million) investment in a new factory.

Revenue rose 10 percent to CNY1.5 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30 from a year earlier, while net profit quadrupled to CNY677 million (USD101.7 million), the Beijing-based firm said in its latest financial statement yesterday.

Net profit excluding non-recurring items widened 16 percent to CNY184 million (USD 27.41 million), E-Town noted, adding that non-recurring gains mainly came from fair-value changes of equity investments.

In the first three quarters of the year, E-Town reported a 5.6 percent decline in revenue to CNY3.6 billion, while its net profit surged 108 percent to CNY1.1 billion. Net profit excluding non-recurring items inched up 3.4 percent to CNY427 million.

In a separate statement yesterday, E-Town said it plans to build a new semiconductor equipment manufacturing plant in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area to mass-produce a range of self-developed semiconductor tools, including dry strip systems, rapid thermal processing systems, dry etch systems, and plasma surface treatment systems.

The project is expected to lift the company’s in-house manufacturing capacity and delivery efficiency, better meet client demand, and boost profitability, E-Town noted, without revealing any further details.

E-Town develops, manufactures, and sells wafer processing equipment for chip fabrication, supplying dry strip, rapid thermal processing, dry etch, and plasma surface treatment systems with supporting process solutions to global fabs, including leading memory and logic chipmakers. Its first manufacturing plant in Beijing started operation in 2018.

E-Town’s shares [SHA: 688729] closed 1.9 percent up at CNY17.39 (USD2.61) apiece in Shanghai today, after earlier gaining as much as 7.7 percent.

Editor: Futura Costaglione