This is Mike Wang, Investor Relations Manager. I am joined by Roger Liang, our Chairman, Felix Teng, our CEO, and Charles Tsai, our CFO. The company's results were just released and are available on our Investor Relations website, where you can download the latest earnings release materials as well as access them from MOPS. This one-hour call will start with Roger providing the corporate highlights before switching to Charles to share our latest financials, and then end with Felix giving our operational highlights. I will then open the floor for participants' Q&A. Before we continue, please kindly be reminded that today's discussions may contain qualitative forward-looking statements based on our current expectations, which are subject to significant risks and uncertainties and may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in these qualitative forward-looking statements.
We're not obligated to update these statements, which are to be used for information purposes only. We will not provide any quantitative forward-looking comments. Please refer to the Safe Harbor Notice in our earnings deck for more details. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that today's call is being recorded and is intended only for institutional investors and sell-side analysts. The recording of this call and these prepared remarks will be uploaded onto our IR website within 24 hours after the conclusion of this call. We sincerely appreciate Fubon Securities for hosting today's call. With that, I will turn the call over to our Chairman, Roger.
Thank you, Mike. BizLink continues to move forward with an increasingly solid financial and operational foundation. Despite the world moving toward greater economic, social, demographic, and political uncertainty, we are no longer the same BizLink that many of you remember. We are now a truly global interconnect supplier with our largest exposure in industrial, accounting for over 40% of total sales these past two years compared to under 20% in the three years prior. This structural shift exemplifies our successful diversification effort, which has made us more agile and allowed us to reduce the negative impact of any single source of weakness. It also enabled us to seize emerging opportunities and deepen customer relationships by providing them with leading-edge solutions. We successfully addressed many legacy challenges through intensive productivity and efficiency initiatives while designing and producing new, high-value solution sets that align with market demand.
A few of these innovative products are already in use, and many more will be integrated into our customer offering this year and the next. Our first quarter 2024 margins are starting to reflect this characteristic, and these improvements will continue despite our currently reduced scale. Our renewed focus on value added and efficiency will eventually be reflected in our long-term performance. Maintaining operational resilience across various businesses and regions ensures customers do not miss any sales opportunity. This is vital to building long-term trust, and we have demonstrated this many times over the past few years. Tighter cash control and management have further bolstered our financial strength. Customers have expressed concern about geo political risks, and they look to us to mitigate this impact while reducing costs.
By providing peace of mind, we continue to win new and exciting projects, wedging our role as a second source with new customers or growing our share of orders in our location. We continue to view that the world is behind us as the rolling slowdown and the disturbance in Industrial, IT DataComm , and Electrical Appliances are nearing an end. Moving into the next growth phase, as evidenced by the quarter-on-quarter increase in New Taiwan Dollar sales and the profit for the first quarter 2024, we are seeing a healthier rate of expansion and are aligned with ongoing market dynamics. Our higher proposed dividend payout for last year's earnings demonstrates our confidence in a gradual improvement in near-term performance. We are proactively preparing for the next upcycle and recognize that the road ahead may be volatile and uneven. Our progress remains achievable.
Clear long-term trends like digitalization, electrification, and corporate responsibility continue to shape the market landscape. Our exposure to these trends provides significant opportunities, as automation, artificial intelligence, and cloud-based management reshape entire industries. Electrification requires robust infrastructure to meet the demand of data and the power-hungry ecosystem, which aligns with global supply chain reshuffling. BizLink is well positioned to support this transition. Our global footprint helps to reduce logistics-related emissions, especially in the emerging economy, which has been stable through growing revenue contributed over the past year, which I will later highlight. Many of our solutions go into end products that promote a greener future. Some of our solutions are environmentally friendly, including being hydrogen-free and/or using plant-based raw materials for the outer jacket of our cable solution. These areas are growing year to year, year on year, each year, and are slowly taking up more of total sales.
They are an important area for product and market development. We recently joined the United Nations Global Compact as a member. We are collecting Scope 3 emission data with disclosure targets for our 2024 CSR report. We joined the Science Based Targets initiative last year, and we are now in the target validation procedure stage. We will soon be releasing our seventh annual 2023 CSR report, and we update the investor relations ESG summary shortly thereafter. Finally, we have been ramping up our efforts in internal training and corporate communication, and we will soon be sharing our product milestones in refining our corporate culture, examples of which can be found on LinkedIn as well as on YouTube. Our consistently positive free cash flow, with the first quarter of 2024 being a sixth straight quarter, will fuel these ambitions.
As Charles shared our latest quarterly financial results, we are showing that BizLink is focused on maintaining its strong cash position, maximizing operational efficiency, and rewarding stakeholders with consistent long-term returns. We aim to stay free cash flow positive in the foreseeable future, ensuring our ability to invest in opportunity and maintain a sustainable growth trajectory.
Thank you, Roger. Now on our first quarter 2024 results. Our first quarter 2024 New Taiwan Dollar sales recovered on a quarter-on-quarter basis, rising 2% but was still down 2% year-over-year. Sales were below budget, but better than our typical first quarter seasonality of a single-digit quarter-on-quarter decline. Gross margins recovered to 26.34%, returning to back above 26%, which we view as being at relative normal levels. This is despite our lower scale, given our improving segment mix, our productivity and efficiency initiatives, and inventory writebacks. Operating expenses to sales ratio stayed high at 17.48% given seasonality, and as operating expenses marginally rose 2% quarter-on-quarter and 3% year-over-year. However, they were still at the low TWD 2 billion level that we have seen over the prior eight quarters.
Operating margins improved to 8.86%, remaining below 10% as our scale needs to be further improved before we see double-digit operating margin again. Non-operating items were moderately up quarter-on-quarter, mainly due to ECB valuation losses, while we saw some modest gains from bank interest income due to our active cash management. Finance costs were marginally down quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year, and it's the lowest it has been since 2022 as we continue to deleverage. We will pay back more debt in the next three quarters to get our liability to asset ratio back to historical levels by the end of this year. Our tax rate was 37.73% given seasonality and given that we repatriated overseas profits. This added 460 basis points to our tax rate, resulting in a deduction of 0.26 TWD to our EPS. We will repatriate some more in the coming quarters.
This will help lower open foreign exchange positions, resulting in lower hedging costs and lower earning volatility from currency fluctuations. Net profit improved 14% quarter-on-quarter but remained below one-year-ago levels, falling 8%. Our EPS was TWD 3.56, which was up 14% quarter-on-quarter but was down 10% year-on-year. Briefly going into our balance sheet and cash flow last, both of which further improved despite headwinds macro challenges. Sharing some top-level perspective, our cash conversion cycle considerably improved quarter-on-quarter, as did our return on invested capital, showing that our intrinsic value potential is currently being underestimated. Operating cash flow dropped quarter-on-quarter as we began to prepare our working capital for better times ahead, which we alluded to last quarter. Our cash balance reached new highs, and we are gradually deploying it to strategically grow our overall business as well as to reward our stakeholders.
Our proposed cash dividend payout ratio is set to rise from 14% in 2022 to 63% in 2023. This proposed payout ratio, representing a dividend yield of nearly 4% versus recent share prices, is more in line with our multi-year average of 65%, excluding 2022's level, and it can be fully supported with our persistently positive free cash flow. Our raw material has been on a general downtrend since the second quarter of 2022 as we ran in our procurement and slowly digested our inventory mix with optimal production utilization, with both work in progress and finished goods falling during this time.
We spent under a third of our 2024 CapEx budget during the recent quarter given the continued buildout of our two new facilities, one in Tainan and one in Batam, which will be done in the coming months, some spent in Xiamen and two strategically growth selected areas of our business. Our segment sales for the first quarter of 2024, Industrial sales accounted for 41% of total, while Electrical Appliances, Auto, and IT DataComm were 15%, 23%, and 20% respectively. Industrial, Electrical Appliances, and Auto sales ended up being slightly better than expected on a quarter-on-quarter basis, but only Electrical Appliances are up on a year-on-year basis. Looking at Industrial first, sales increased 2% quarter-on-quarter but decreased 6% year-on-year. Energy storage was flat quarter-on-quarter as was capital equipment. Healthcare fell 1% while factory automation fell 2%. Tailor-made product was up 28% quarter-on-quarter.
IT DataComm 's sales increased 4% quarter-over-quarter but decreased 6% year-over-year. High-Performance Computing fell 9% quarter-over-quarter as data cable solutions fell while power connector solutions were flat after growing 5% quarter-over-quarter last quarter. Power cable solutions grew 34% quarter-over-quarter after already growing 16% quarter-over-quarter last quarter. Peripherals fell 8% quarter-over-quarter, with docking down 7% quarter-over-quarter and dongles down 12% quarter-over-quarter. Moving on to Auto next, sales increased 1% quarter-over-quarter but decreased 16% quarter-over-year. Electric vehicle and related was down 7% quarter-over-quarter while silicone was up 11% quarter-over-quarter. Finally, Electrical Appliances were up 15% quarter-over-quarter and are up 9% quarter-over-year, which is in line with the sales growth reported by publicly listed companies within this space, showing no loss in relative market share. Systems rose over 30% quarter-over-quarter while power cords were up by over 20% quarter-over-quarter.
Year-over-year-wise, Industrial sales look to have bottomed, and we have soon seen sales become positive. It will be driven by growth in capital equipment, healthcare, and energy, and by a bottoming out in factory automation. IT DataComm sales are moving in the right direction, and there is a good chance that sales here also become positive going forward, driven by High-Performance Computing outgrowing a stabilization in peripherals, where we have been slowly writing back some finished goods inventory over the past few months. Autos trended lower and may be the only one that will fall this year. We stay conservative on this business given recent developments and headlines in the Auto space, and we do not expect to see a recovery this year. Silicone is the key highlight.
Finally, Electrical Appliances are moving in the right direction as well, albeit the trajectory of the recovery has been uneven thus far. Looking at our sales in our four key regions next, sales in Europe were up quarter-over-quarter mainly due to Industrial and, to a lesser extent, Electrical Appliances. Sales in Southeast Asia were up quarter-over-quarter mainly due to Industrial and were also boosted by a reshoring trend within IT DataComm. In addition, quarter-over-quarter sales growth in Southeast Asia outpaced those of our other regions given continued growth, emerging markets demand, and in our overall exposure there. Sales in the U.S. were up quarter-over-quarter mainly due to Auto and were boosted by a reshoring trend in Industrial. Sales in China continued to decline quarter-over-quarter, but the pace of declines stayed similar to the prior two quarters despite the negative impact from a reshoring trend.
Our global footprint and structural shift to a higher value area helped to reduce the impact from rolling slowdown, post-COVID-19 overheating of our growth, as well as successfully managing through external risks, including supply chain disruption and shortages. Looking at the bigger picture, our management efficiency, favorable market position, and competitive advantage are slowly flowing through to our performance. Despite our quarterly sales being lower by roughly TWD 1 billion than the three highs we saw in the past two years when we experienced gross margin over 26%, we still achieved a gross margin of 26.34%. Our product mix may become more variable than last year's given the drivers that we see this year, which Felix will go over next. This will help boost our profit as our sales growth pickup, cost control persists, and we further deleverage.
Tax issues will take longer to resolve to realize more of our sales as profit, but we anticipate gradual improvement here as early as late this year. Continued high-level positive free cash flow, which has averaged well over TWD 1 billion per quarter in the past six quarters, and active cash management meant being able to weather last year's downturn and to return to growth from the first quarter of 2024 onwards, as well as getting back to preserving a stable growing long-term cash dividend policy. We are gradually shifting gears from prioritizing deleveraging and CapEx spending to building a strong cash balance for future suitable strategic opportunities, including engaging in tuck-in M&A along our previously defined three C's, which are capability, customer, and capacity, and new product and/or market development, as well as enhancing long-term stakeholder value.
We're also actively looking at ways to disclose more meaningful details about BizLink to investors and analysts through our investor relations team given the complexity of our business. We chose to initially do through our quarterly results call and earnings material for over two years now. Our IR team started to go back on the road late last year, visiting New York in September, and we anticipate planning more overseas activity in the coming quarter, including potentially having site visits and arranging sessions during our exhibit for investors and analysts, which we have not done for some time now. We hope to increase the capital markets understanding of BizLink's operations, strategy, and market opportunities so that everyone can achieve a greater appreciation of it. Felix will now provide an update on our latest quarterly operational takeaways.
All right. Thank you, Charles.
While the overall interconnect industry continues to grow hand in hand each year, the number of suppliers that are still growing and financially healthy are slowly declining. The reason behind this is due to the volatile nature of today's operating environment. From the emergence of trade tensions in 2018 to 2019, the pandemic in 2020 to 2021, the various supply chain challenges in 2021 to 2022, and then the geopolitical and economic tensions in 2023 to nowadays, this has necessitated global brand name customers to reduce their total number of suppliers while requiring the remaining ones to do more things, from NPI to design to production in more places, from Asia to America to Europe, to reduce their risk and their costs.
A perfect example of this is a number one interconnect supplier in our industry, who engaged in an average of over five M&A deals every year from 2017 to 2023. Many of these same customers are also selectively increasingly directly dealing with their component suppliers instead of going through system assemblies, some of which were becoming their competitors for greater flexibility and control, offering better pricing and margins to these suppliers. This is a drastic change in business models, and there are opportunities as the landscape shuffles. The bigger will only become bigger, and BizLink aspires to be one of these suppliers. Our first quarter of 2024 New Taiwan dollars saw a marginal quarter-on-quarter increase, our first in several quarters. We are entering into our next growth phase, and the drivers of this time around will not be the same as our last one.
However, our last growth cycle was dominated by our high volume, low mix areas, whereas this time we have a much higher sales exposure to Industrial, so the roll back up will not be the same as the prior one given the business nature of this segment. Our structure shift towards premium value and ongoing efficiency measures means that there is room for more margin improvement. Our key segment highlights are still Industrial and IT DataComm , with potential upside to both. The key segment lowlights is still Auto, with potential downside. Our higher gross margin areas are expected to outgrow the corporate average after being a relatively weaker position last year. This page shows the respective highlights and lowlights within each segment, as well as our general quarter-on-quarter view for the second quarter of 2024. We remain conservative on Auto.
With our mega trends, we expect HPC, that's High-Performance Computing, capital equipment, healthcare, energy, silicone, and robotics to be the earnings catalyst this year, representing a total of 55% of first quarter 2024 sales. We have many exciting new innovations that will make it into a strong project pipeline, and this will gradually be reflected in our performance in the next few quarters. Market development efforts are also progressing along quite well. Most of our drivers this year will be growing above the corporate average, and a few of them also have above corporate average gross margins. Additionally, peripherals and automation and drives, which collectively accounted for 14% of first quarter 2024 sales, will weigh less on total sales growth later in the year.
EA, that's Electrical Appliances, will also be up this year, but we currently do not consider this to be a mega trend given its heavy consumer-centric nature. Four out of the six catalysts come from this segment, Industrial product segment. Looking at the capital equipment list, first, we already began to see increasing forecasts from the beginning of this year as sales from front-end semiconductor capital equipment makers began to recover, not just for cables, but for interconnect systems as well. The trend for cleaner solutions with less outgassing and particulation remains strong and boosts revenue in our high-end semiconductor product lines. In addition, we are also seeing a steadily rising mix of box build and system integration projects. We are freeing up floor space to accommodate the sustained increase in this kind of high-value projects as we further build our track records here.
Next to semiconductor, we seek to increase our exposure to HVACs and are exploring high-complexity power distribution unit box builds. We have project visibility that extends into the second half of next year and order visibility extending into the end of this year. Business development efforts are ongoing with non-U.S. customers and for additional projects for production in the U.S. Our customers are preparing for the industry boom next year from the second half of this year. Looking at medical specialties next, we are seeing the trend for even cleaner cable and system solutions in our inner body. Endoscopy market segment grows at double digits on a year categories. This kind of solution means high degrees of in-house engineering and material competence for very stringent medical requirements.
Our major energy storage customers will continue to increase its production capacity in the U.S., and they have since begun construction of its new facilities in China. Although the revenue contribution is still small now, the growth here is very high due to the lower base. Lead time is no longer visible for our customers' industrial-grade product for power grids from their website, suggesting that wait time should be much more than the year plus that it lasts showed. Finally, there are three exciting milestones to share about robotics. Our robotic cable management systems are gaining traction in non-auto industries, and our new LSH Delta product is helping to support this trend. We recently launched our innovative e-learning platform. This online training portal stands out as a unique solution for automation technologies.
It not only facilitates the retention of essential knowledge, but also equips employees with the necessary skills to thrive in the world of automation. Finally, in modular medical robots, we secure a multi-year strategic contract with large Chinese customers for our orientation positioning systems. Additionally, our development efforts have led to the versatile PULSAR modular robots tailored for paramedical applications, including in the fields of physiotherapy or skin treatments. On IT Data Comm product segments, looking at High-Performance Computing, the number of new projects that are expected to go into the start of production will more than double half on half from the second half of last year to the first half of this year, and then more than double half on half again in the second half of this year.
This means that the number of new projects will be up nearly six-fold year-over-year in the second half of this year. Project visibility extends into the next few years. This is not even considering potential new data centers being built to fulfill data sovereignty requirements, as most data centers are in the U.S. now. There will need to be many new ones introduced in Southeast Asia, where we have local production for HPC, and in Europe in years to come. In fact, two North American CSPs just announced multibillion-dollar investments to build data centers in the Southeast Asia region to support a growing population of, a nd that their rising purchasing power.
Our external DAC and AEC and server high-speed interconnect solutions, as well as our server and rack high-power cable and connector solutions, are being sold to existing customers, as well as new ones for the latest AI-accelerating computing programs. We have been developing high-specification server and high-power cables for one of the industry's most advanced AI computing platforms. We expect that the program will go into mass production later this year or early next year. The revenue impact could be significant once it goes to mass production and represents a multi-year opportunity for us. We are looking at selling more of our HPC solutions to major North American CSPs and server ODMs, and aiming to raise our exposure to data center infrastructure service providers. We are exploring liquid-cooled interconnects and silicone cables and assembly opportunities for cooling applications.
These do not require a complete CapEx-intensive overhaul of existing data center layouts and infrastructures. We are also upgrading our technologies here, moving to 16 lanes per cable and to 224 Gbps per lane for data and from 12 V DC to 48 V DC for power. Finally, our co-packaged optics R&D efforts continue. On the Automotive product segment, looking at this segment, we are exploring and winning more battery-based EV high-mix, low-volume business, including for electric trucks, tractors, motorcycles, and ATVs, and looking into potential opportunities for battery supplement module assemblies. However, the highlight for this segment is silicone. We are developing and pushing new lower upper threshold temperature silicone cables for the Auto market, which remains its bread and butter. We are actively engaged in non-auto projects as well, including for power distribution and rolling stock applications.
On the Electrical Appliances product segment, looking at this segment last, the outlook here has visibly improved, and sales will be driven by the launch of new products. We are working to win more systems-level projects and are in the process of continuously adding new functionalities for the appliances into the power supply interface. We continue to be key suppliers for our major customers across multiple product segments, often being the primary supplier for their flagship products. We have been gaining market shares with many of them. Finally, we are seeing the first signs of new heat pump projects return. Now, let me turn the call over to Mike.
Thank you, Roger, Felix, and Charles. This concludes our prepared statements section. Now, let us begin the Q&A section. Please type in your questions, and then we will answer as many of them as possible in the time remaining.
I see a lot of the audience has asked about the Auto business given the headlines as of late. So I'll just read a couple of the questions so everybody has an idea of what's being typed. For Auto, do you turn even more conservative or more positive now? What is the EV revenue exposure and growth this year? Have we seen any recovery in the EV market? What's the firm's strategy in Auto business given that the order outlook of the U.S. major customers hit by competition, as well as the customers decelerating growth? Let's see. What else? Given recent conservative comments from IDMs on Auto, how long will it take to see easing inventory issues for the U.S. E.U. market from your perspective? The inventory situation for Auto? What is our strategy for EV business given competition and sharp pricing decline for EVs?
There was a question about seeing potential pressure in the second half from price declines. Automotive business, we mentioned Auto might be the downside for this year. I'm wondering if you see things turn out to be better or worse now entering the second half of this year. Lastly, we see, and could you share your thoughts on what will be the impacts if European and U.S. OEMs slow down pure EV development but instead accelerate hybrid vehicles? That's a lot of questions, but in general, it's just asking about our Auto business, what the outlook is there, and what we're doing to address this current downside going up. For this particular question, I'd like to hand it over to Felix. And also, if Roger, if you have any comments that you'd like to make, please do feel free afterwards. Please, Felix?
Yeah, indeed.
There are a lot of questions on the Auto business and also our view or our outlook. Okay. So already, we mentioned quite a few things in the prepared statements, but we'll just add a few more. Okay. But in general, we are very conservative on the EV. We are known as a high-volume, low-mix auto company due to our well-covered customers, which, of course, we are not going to specifically talk about today. But look at the bigger picture. The auto industry is a cyclical one, and there's panic around this right now, as we can see from the questions we have received, many of them. So we remain optimistic about this long-term prospect as EVs are one of our mega trends, this so-called new energy transportation. Okay. And we continue to be actively developing new products and markets with our Auto business.
So again, let's not forget that much of our sales is in Industrial now, and our two prior big merger and acquisition deals were also in the Industrial segment. So our Auto sales peaked in the second quarter last year and fell 11% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter and further down 9% in the fourth quarter. And this first quarter is up a little bit, 1%. While we do not expect full-year sales to be up year-over-year this year, it is possible that we start to see sales increase quarter-on-quarter due to our various business development activities, especially with high-mix, low-volume areas, which may offset the near-term weakness in that customer. So the timing sometimes is very hard to set in stone, though.
The downcycle has thus far not been a doomsday scenario for us, as our prior experience led us to see and work far ahead. So we see many opportunities out there. And while we are only seeing the accretive stage of contribution from some of them, there's still more work to be done. So again, we remain cautious. And we do not expect a year-over-year recovery this year with a possible downside if market demand does not pick up given the finished goods inventory status. That's from me.
All right. For the next, let me see, set of questions, quite nice to have quite a few questions on the Industrial business given that it's, in fact, the largest one that we have right now, as Felix just mentioned and as we mentioned during the remarks. Let me see.
The inventory situation for Industrial, do we see a clear sign of demand bottoming out? Where are we in the destocking and restocking cycle now? Can we expect an easing inventory level? And does BizLink negatively impact on China's healthcare anti-corruption campaign from last year? And let me see. Where are we at now for the cycle for semis, Industrial Auto, and data center? Anything different than we had expected previously? So while the last question focused on Auto, this one will be on the Industrial business. Again, I'd like to hand this over to Felix as well.
All right. Yeah, Industrial is one of the two segments we're getting incrementally more optimistic about. But destocking does not look to be entirely over yet. So conditions do not currently appear to be worsening. And like what we mentioned earlier, it's been bottoming out.
Some of our categories are already back to quarter-on-quarter growth. So for example, the factory automations, including the automation and drives business units and robotic solution business units. So both are from INBG. While we are getting more positive about RSBU, that's a robotic solution business unit, as we highlighted earlier in my prepared statement, and the ADBU still needs a little more time as customers continue to destock. So we are seeing similar situations in healthcare where the diagnostics and related areas need a little more time to destock. But the treatment and related areas are still quickly growing, albeit from a smaller base, which we also shared earlier. So we're not impacted by the anti-corruption and anti-dumping campaign in China last year.
So if I were to compare where we are in the destocking cycle now in Industrial relative to Auto, I would say the Industrial, which is about 50% of the first-quarter sales this year, is in a later stage. And Auto, which was 23% of first-quarter sales this year, is in an earlier to middle stage now. So our Industrial sales have fallen quarter-on-quarter in four out of the last six quarters, declining 12%. Whereas our Auto sales have only fallen quarter-on-quarter in two out of the last three quarters, declining 18%.
Thank you, Felix, for the color on that question. Let me see. There are a lot of questions on copper, especially given the increase in copper prices lately. Let me read them. The impact of copper price increases on revenue and profitability.
Are there any cost controls given the rising material costs and logistics interruptions recently? And then, of course, the impact on gross margins, if any. For this one, I'd like to hand it over to Charles. Charles, please.
Okay. Thank you. Actually, we previously shared a sensitive analysis for copper about two years ago when input costs were spiking. Then the analysis was still valid today. Some of our business are tightly correlated to copper's pricing based on the copper model. Generally, a slow increase or decrease in copper price can be fully passed on to our customer within one to three months. And as we hedge in copper futures, the only impact we usually see is a change in pricing with little or no impact to our cost of goods sales.
If copper prices do substantially well, then there is a good chance that the demand environment is improving and it's possible that we may see upside in our sales. So we have not really seen any direct logistic interruptions in those materials. As for material price overall, I believe in the inflationary environment, there are still many things that we can do to lessen the impact of underlying material costs, potentially even totally offsetting that. We have shared many ways in the past, but as a reminder, of course, we have managed our supply chain suppliers. We can negotiate to replace some raw material. As we mentioned earlier in this discussion, that we are pushing forward with our high-value added project and product. We can also continue with our efficiency and productivity enhancement efforts.
Thank you, Charles, for providing the color on that.
And then, of course, for those who posed the question on copper. Now, there's one particular question that's from one person in the audience. And this is about the INBG acquisition. It's been more than two years since INBG acquisition. Can you provide colors on what has the firm achieved in terms of integration and what could be further done going forward for even better synergies? For this one, I'd also like to hand it over to Charles. Charles, please.
Okay. Thanks, Mike. Actually, we have achieved many synergies since the acquisition, and we have been sharing most of them in our quarterly updates over the past year. We will still provide some summary for everyone. First, we have synergy management systems better aligning our global resources to moving toward one goal and actively sharing best practices in different parts.
Lastly, we have sales, operational, and even finance so that we can share those best practices and resolve similar issues much faster and more efficiently. There will be continuous improvement and lasting process. We also combined our respective High-Performance Computing business units last year, which we shared in the media conference earlier this year. We already launched a new co-developed solution with MultiLane. We issued press releases on our website and highlighted some of this on our LinkedIn account and have been attending various exhibits, which some of you graciously attended. Many of them are in early to middle stages and will not materially contribute to near-term performance, while others are already being sold to customers in initial volumes. We identified areas of synergy mainly on our market development side and our aligning with customer potentials to increase our wallet by promoting and opening doors for other business units.
So co-selling, we have received positive feedback from some of this activity and are actively pursuing that. Finally, we're starting to see first collaboration occur for a shared footprint in Asia, North America, and in Europe. And we expect some effort to solidify and be realized in the coming quarters to better service our customers across our global sites.
Thank you, Charles, for providing the color on that question. We still have a couple more minutes left. Let me see. There's a question from a couple of you, let me see, they asked about our cash and M&A. Let me read some of the questions. Since cash on hand has reached the record high, will we have any M&A opportunities? Let me see. Any upcoming plan for acquisitions in the foreseeable future? Any criteria for targeted candidates?
And for this one, I'd like to hand it over to Roger.
Okay. Yeah. Can you hear me?
Yes.
All right. Good. So yeah. Again, we seem to hear this every quarter. Okay? And while we are evaluating potential candidates every week, it does not mean that we will do anything. Okay? Many of the targets that we have been looking at relatively tend to be targets, most of whom we can easily acquire with our existing cash table. This kind of target may be more about their unique capability rather than their customer capacity, even their relatively smaller scale. And the point of this kind of deal is to complement or supplement our own capability so that we can do even more for our customer without having to start from scratch and reinventing the wheel. This allows us to win more opportunities sooner.
So we've been very focused on some of the new capability or expanding our capability in maybe some new products like the busbar, okay, and in our region, okay, our Southeast Asia. And we are also looking at some opportunity to expand our NPI and all the manufacturing in North America. Okay? So these are some of the projects, the so-called targeting project, the smaller project that we have been looking seriously in addition to the other projects. Okay? So this project may happen if everything goes well. Okay? However, we must also evaluate our capital allocation option. What is the current operational situation? What is the current market outlook? And what time of the year it is? As we usually pay dividends in August and September, and how much debt can we pay back? Okay? And we already shared our three C's earlier after first introducing them last quarter.
Those are the criteria that we will search for for our M&A case and in our evaluation of this project. Okay? I hope this answered your question.
Great. Thank you, Roger, for providing the feedback on that question. Again, we still have time for maybe one or two more questions. Let me see. Scrolling down, there is a question about our first quarter inventory writebacks. Do we have any comments on this? For this one, I'd like to hand it over to Charles.
Okay. Actually, I would say for the first quarter, overall, group-wise, we still have a minor inventory loss provisioning or something like less than TWD 1 million. But if we only single out the problem child, which the docking and dongles that we have been talking about so far, I would say we write back.
We wrote back something like more than $1 million this quarter as our customers keep pulling. So not really much. But if we compare the loss, it's much, much less than the same period last year where we sold probably $5 million provisioning loss in the same time last year. So it makes a real big difference.
Thank you, Charles. And also thank you to the investor that answered that question. Let me see. What else is there? Let me take a look. For the final question, there's a question from an investor about updating our revenue guidance since we see better IT industry demand. Again, we mentioned at the beginning of the call we're not providing any quantitative forward-looking statements in this call. Let me see. What else is there? I think that's it. Well, thank you, Roger, Felix, and Charles. This concludes our Q&A section.
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