United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) decided to once again expand its influence on Taiwanese IT business and acquired recently 40% stake of ULi Electronics through its 42%-owned affiliate Unitech Capital. ULi Electronics is an independent subsidiary of ALi Corporation, which deals with core-logic and multimedia-related chips.

As reported at DigiTimes, ALi announced yesterday that it had sold 32 million of ULi shares to Unitech Capital for NT$720 million (approximately $20.71 million). This boosted ALi’s pre-tax EPS by NT$2.56 (approximately $0.07 million).

Earlier this year UMC acquired 30% stake in SiS, second largest core-logic designer in Taiwan, and also appointed John Hsuan, the CEO of UMC, as the chairman of SiS. Now we can expect him, or any other executive from UMC to get a position at ULi’s management board.

UMC recently decided to consolidate its clients and concentrate on certain key-customers instead of trying to compete with TSMC and other contract semiconductors manufacturers for additional clients (see this news-story). It looks like that now the company wants to acquire stakes in some of its customers and then try to make those clients to stick to UMC’s manufacturing capacities. This strategy seems to be reasonable, as in this case UMC benefits from a successful product twice: once when it makes a wafer and once when a chip designer sells it. On the other hand, both SiS and ULi will take advantage of more favourable prices on wafers at UMC. According to UMC, there will be no fierce competition between ULi and SiS, as the companies have different portfolios of products. The latter does not seem to be 100% correct, as both companies now try to expand their product families.