Shipments of personal digital assistants (PDAs) made by Taiwanese contract manufacturers hit 3.5 million units in the third quarter, as a result of brand-name companies releasing more orders for phone PDAs and PDAs with global positioning systems (GPS), the Market Intelligence Center (市場情報中心) said yesterday.
The figure represented an annual growth of 51.8 percent and quarterly increase of 8.7 percent, mainly boosted by an increase in orders from international firms such as Palm Inc and Hewlett-Packard, the government-funded research house said in a press release.
"This means 80 percent of worldwide PDAs in the last quarter were produced by Taiwanese companies, which have been churning out phone PDAs with high technology entry barriers," center analyst Stone Wu (吳善同) said.
Looking at the product categories -- phone PDAs, GPS-based PDAs and pure PDAs -- phone PDAs accounted for the largest portion of local shipments in the third quarter at 1.3 million units, or 37.3 percent, he said.
The second-largest category was GPS-based PDAs, with 1.2 million units in shipments, or 34.5 percent of total volume, Wu said.
"The resolved shortage of Intel's application processors in the second quarter prompted shipments of GPS-based PDAs to soar, which led to excess inventories in the third quarter," he said.
Although brandname vendors such as Dell and Acer reduced their orders for pure PDAs, large orders for Palm's Z22 model helped make the segment's volume reach 975,000 units, or 28.2 percent, MIC said.
The average selling price of US$228 was a considerable increase in comparison with the US$179 price tag in the same period of last year, but down from US$235 in the second quarter, MIC said.
Looking ahead, total PDA shipments will reach 4.2 million units in the fourth quarter, up 20 percent over the previous quarter, thanks to the year's end holiday season.
The rollout of new models supporting the third-generation (3G) mobile network will boost the phone PDA volume to 1.6 million units in this quarter for a 38 percent share of total shipments, Wu said.
"This effect will continue into the first quarter of next year, helping boost phone PDA shipments to an estimated 1.8 million units," he said.
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