Net income surged 64 percent to NT$12.6 billion in the three months ended Dec. 31 from a year ago. The numbers were derived from full-year earnings the Taipei-based company announced yesterday. Profit beat the NT$10.9 billion median estimate of five analysts in a Bloomberg survey, and the increase was the largest since the final quarter of 2004.

Nan Ya Plastics has relied on investments in technology businesses, including its semiconductor unit, for growth in earnings against a background of rising competition from Chinese chemical producers such as China Petroleum & Chemical Corp.

“The main drive in Nan Ya Plastics’ earnings growth is in electronics materials,” Audrey Chiu, an analyst at Yuanta Core Pacific Capital Management Co., said before the earnings announcement. She has a “buy” recommendation on the stock.

Earnings surged 58 percent from a year earlier in the second quarter and 32 percent in the third. Nan Ya Plastics spokesman Wu Chia-chau confirmed the derived fourth-quarter figures.

Nanya Technology Corp., Taiwan’s second-biggest memory-chip maker, reported in January a record profit of NT$6.47 billion for the fourth quarter, surging from NT$292 million a year earlier. Nan Ya Plastics owns 44 percent of the semiconductor producer, according to the plastics maker’s annual report in June.

Fourth-quarter sales advanced 13 percent to NT$46.6 billion, according to previous stock exchange filings.

Shares of Nan Ya Plastics advanced 0.5 percent to NT$62 by the Taiwan Stock Exchange’s 1:30 p.m. close, before the earnings were announced. The stock has risen 14 percent this year, compared with a 0.8 percent gain in the benchmark Taiex index.

Net income in 2006 climbed 19 percent to NT$47.5 billion from NT$40 billion in 2005, Nan Ya Plastics said in an e-mailed statement today. The company plans to pay a cash dividend of NT$5 per share, the company said. That compares with a cash dividend of NT$3.7 and a stock dividend of 3 percent for 2005.

The company started out as a plastics-product maker more than four decades ago and has expanded into manufacturing of petrochemicals, polyester and electronics components such as materials used to make printed circuit boards.

Sinopec, as Beijing-based China Petroleum is known, and BASF AG, the world’s biggest chemical company, in June 2005 started jointly operating a US$2.9 billion chemical plant and processing units in Nanjing, eastern China.

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