Welcome to E Ink first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Today's speaker is Chairman, Mr. Johnson Lee, CFO, Mr. Lloyd Chen, and Finance Director, Mr. Patrick Zhang. All participants are currently in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A session. A WebEx replay will be available after today's conference. Please visit tw.eink.com under the investor relations section. We now proceed with the conference.
Good everyone. My name is Lloyd Chen. Welcome to E Ink first quarter earnings conference. Before we start, please take a quick look at the safe harbor statement. Thank you. Next page. All right. Firstly, I would like to briefly talk about the first quarter results. E Ink first quarter 2021 sales revenue was around NTD 4.4 billion, and that led to the operating profit nearly NTD 1 billion. Specifically, it's NTD 968 million. The net income was around NTD 1.2 billion, and EPS NTD 1.03. The sales revenue and operating profit and the net income for first quarter was the best first quarter in the past eight years. However, you may notice there was a slightly decreased amount of operating income due to the less exchange gain in the first quarter for 2021. That's for the P&L for first quarter. Next page. Talking about the operating profit.
The first quarter operating profit was 14 times growth year-over-year from NTD 45 million to NTD 968 million due to a strong demand from the market through eReader, eNote, retail, and signage. Next page. For those balance sheet items, I would like to specifically focus on the asset side. Basically from the screen, you can see there was a positive increasing trend on cash assets, and then total assets and even the net asset value. Next page. Now for the cash flow. Our cash flow was decreased from NTD 13 billion to NTD 10.8 billion because we converted cash for more financial investments and also for CapEx, of course, to meet the strong market demand. As you can see from the screen, the total financial assets plus cash was increased to around NTD 30 billion by first quarter this year. That's for the cash flow part. Okay.
After I just went through those financial items, I would like to talk about color technology again. With the continuous efforts in R&D for color ePaper, we have launched three complete color ePaper technologies that are very much suitable for different smart fields. The first one, once again, is E Ink Kaleido Plus. We also call it Print Color ePaper. I'm using basically the color filter technology and RGB color mixing principle. ePaper is converted from black and white into 4,096 rich colors. E Ink Kaleido Plus feature and improved sunlight. When it's turned on, E Ink Kaleido Plus creates saturated image from 3x the color gamut over the previous generation, even with more warmer colors.
At the same time, the new generation of Kaleido has the capability to play animations and videos with E Ink eNote products, providing new options to educational and professional devices, especially very helpful on the digital learning. The next one is the E Ink Spectra 3100, basically full color ePaper technology. This is our newest generation of Spectra, basically utilizes four color particles, black, white, red, and yellow. Spectra 3100 features high resolution and high saturation color, which displays rich content. It can be used in ESL or promotional signage. The flashing when changing the image even brings eye-catching effects for the retailers during the event promotion. Last but not least, E Ink Gallery, Advanced Color ePaper, ACeP. E Ink Gallery is based on full-color ePaper display technology.
Four types of color electronic ink particles are used to achieve the full color gamut on display by dynamically combining and mixing the particles through voltage control. The paper-like texture of E Ink Gallery offer the visual effect of printed posters, making it suitable for public information display, commercial signage, and digital display carriage for art galleries, museums. In Touch Taiwan a few weeks ago, the 13.3-inch and 25.3-inch E Ink Gallery products were on display. The 13.3-inch color ePaper signage system was also introduced into Taoyuan International Airport in Taiwan, Terminal 2, for use by the taxi fleet to promote pandemic prevention information. That's about our color technology. Next page. The next page is about the ePaper Industry Alliance we just set up. E Ink and BOE and Holitech jointly launched the establishment of the Electronic Paper Industry Alliance, being abbreviated as EPIA, where it's located in Shanghai.
Quite a few key Chinese and Taiwanese companies, such as Lenovo, Hisense, TPV, Tencent, and MediaTek, Inventec, Innolux joined. The purpose of the EPIA is to build up a better platform for ePaper ecosystem and well utilize the platform to expand the ePaper applications shown on screens. As you can see from the screen, smart transportation, smart airport, smart education, smart factory, smart logistics, and even smart retails, and to the smart office, hospitals. The members in EPIA can explore more business opportunities. Currently, there are more than 60 companies joined so far. Most of them from China because they do see the green concept requested from the China government, which would trigger the demand of ePaper products. 100 companies to be expected by end of this year, being double up on more than 200 companies for next year.
That's about the alliance, ePaper Industry Alliance, we just set up. For the ESG, we have been continuously working on the ESG and sustainability. Basically, ESG performance nowadays is an essential element for international investors. Those investors care about not only finance performance of the company, but also ESG performance. E Ink, our core product is ePaper, so which is expected to replace conventional paper so that the product features such as low power consumption, long standing, easy on eyes, and sunlight visibility, all being reflected in the United Nations SDG goals, such as good health and wellbeing, quality education, affordable and clean energy. Such green product as a fundamental to the environmental perspective, we estimate that our product enabled the reduction of 230 million tons of CO2 in the past five years.
E Ink also devoted in purchasing Taiwan Renewable Energy Certificate, creating solar energy, and protecting water resource by water withdrawal reduction. From the social perspective, we E Ink established an internal E Ink University as a global training platform. We also send the qualified employees and talents to join a Stanford LEAD business program. E Ink also conducts the multiple years lasting project, eRead for the Future, especially in Taiwan, to establish the eReader library for schools in remote areas. E Ink, as a member of UNGC, also joined Young SDG Innovators Programme to deliver on ESG values. From the corporate governance perspective, E Ink is rated as top 20% among 10 exchange-listed company by corporate governance evaluation for fourth consecutive year. We won multiple awards from TCSA, we are also listed on the final list of the Global Views Monthly CSR Awards.
Unfortunately, we didn't win the award. We have been somehow recognized for efforts and achievement in terms of the ESG. There's one we just launched, index named TPEx ESG IT Elite Total Return Index, and selected us, E Ink, as one of the 10 constituents, which should be appreciated considering our ESG efforts and also profitability capabilities. That's our ESG and sustainability achievement. Next page. Further, I would like to explain more of the index I just mentioned. For the Taiwan Index Plus, basically that's an index company, very famous one in Taiwan, customized the TPEx ESG IT Elite Total Return Index. It's compiled by selecting 10 Taipei Exchange listed electronic companies, which fulfill criteria of financial indicators and also market capitalization. Constituents are weighted according to their free-float adjusted market capitalization.
It also represents the business and technical performance of the Taipei Exchange listed electronic companies that are sustainable and representative. E Ink was honored to be one of them. That's for the index I just mentioned. We also have one achievement on the clean energy. I think being done last week. We are the first company contracted, and we have accomplished 10% of installed renewable energy in Taiwan. Basically, in order to meet that contracted, we have to accomplish that required renewable in advance. That's for the ESG on the IT Elite Total Return Index and the clean energy. Next page. One more thing I would like to mention. Last week, we extend ePaper to the non-display application. E Ink becomes the largest strategic shareholder in Nuclera through the [clean hour] digital microfluidics team. Let me just briefly introduce this company, Nuclera.
It's a company, a fast-growing biotech company, developing protein and gene synthesis technologies. Combining the technologies between Nuclera and E Ink definitely will enable the delivery of the revolutionary desktop protein and gene bioprinter with breakthrough speed and convenience for researchers in human health, agriculture, and other markets of the global importance. Nuclera has been working in a strategic partner with us since 2018 to deploy Nuclera's proprietary biosynthesis technologies on E Ink digital microfluidic devices. Instead of the physical channels found in conventional microfluidics, digital microfluidics uses electronic signals to guide the micro droplets. When combined with Nuclera biosynthesis, this advanced microchip technology will enable the user in a single day to digitally program the bioprinting of the proteins and genes on a desktop device. The result is a bioprinter that gives unprecedented access to biology. Those products will be commercialized, being expected in 2022.
To be short, with our technology and Nuclera's technology, the combined technology can basically shorten the protein and genes synthesis process from months to days. That's our achievement, to extend our technology to the non-display field. Next page. Last but not least, as explained in the previous quarter, we started capacity expansion for future growth, four additional ePaper production lines, and the board just approved the Hsinchu new building. It's under planning for the factory and office. That's the expansion, the preparation for the future growth. We do feel the strong ePaper demand, which is higher than our supply. Therefore, how we can better manage our supply chain and ePaper capacity to realize those higher demand into sales revenue will be our key focus in the second half and even next year. That's about my update for the first quarter.
We can move to the Q&A session. Thank you.
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Hi, Jerry. I saw your question again. I thought you were in our Chinese investor conference. I guess you're joining our English one. Driver IC constraint, I think it's a worldwide problem. We're trying the best we can try to resolve it. As you know, currently our demand is a lot larger than what we can supply. Not just on our E Ink material side, which we sell mostly to our module partners, our module ecosystem partners. On our own module, we couldn't get enough driver ICs. I think the glass part is less of a concern. More on the driver IC side. We do see week-to-week improvement on the ICs and glass in terms of supply. Hopefully it'll get better. It's hard to say because the current market situation changes a lot.
We think, yeah, we'll just have to see it on a weekly basis. Okay, your second question is, Taiwan goes to level 4. How will that impact your operation? Definitely it will impact our operation because we do make E Ink material in our Nekoosa factory. It will cut down in terms of how much we can produce, but it's really up to the government policy, what is allowed and what is not allowed. We really have to see the latest government protocol to have a better assessment.
Another question by Robin Gill. Why were the sales softer at year-over-year in April of 2021? Will the company provide guidance for second quarter of 2021? I think for Q2 2021, it should be about the same as Q1 2021. The demand is actually stronger in Q2, but because our supply chain is short on IC and some TFT, so we couldn't ship enough. Q2 should be about the same as Q1.
Sales revenue.
Yeah, in terms of sales revenue. We don't see further questions, so thank you for your participation today, and talk to you soon for next one.