Asustek Computer Inc (華碩電腦), the world's largest motherboard maker, said yesterday that it expected to increase sales of personal-digital-assistant (PDA) phones domestically by five-fold this year.
The company is set to sell 100,000 units of PDA phones here, with a total line up of eight phones, said Benson Lin (林宗樑), general manager of Asustek's Asia-Pacific division.
This compares to the 20,000 units it sold locally last year, when it had only two product choices, he said.
"The PDA phone market looks good as more enterprise clients are relying on the phones to conduct their daily business," Lin said at a product launch yesterday.
For the first six months of the year, total shipments of PDA phones carrying the "Asus" brand were expected to number around 500,000 units in the Asia-Pacific region, the company's main mobile phone market, he said.
Asustek, which entered the own-brand phone market four years ago, decided late last year to gradually switch its focus to PDA phones.
Company chairman Jonney Shih (施崇棠) reiterated last week at a brand forum in Taipei that the company's strategy was to gradually replace general "feature phones" with PDA phones.
"We will have to make a choice and find a positioning for our products. Our phones need to be attractive to `digital users,'" Shih said.
The company launched four feature phones this year along with two PDA models, but only PDA handsets would be available next year, it said.
Yesterday Asustek introduced the Asus P526, a PDA phone that features a 2.6-inch touch screen, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a 2-megapixel camera and a global positioning system module. It runs the latest Windows Mobile 6 and weighs in at 115g.
It comes with a hefty price tag: NT$18,800 (US$572).
International Data Corp Taiwan said on Monday that around 1.8 million mobile phones were sold domestically in the first quarter, down 3.2 percent from the same period last year.
Taiwanese brands -- including Asus, BenQ Siemens and OKWAP -- saw their combined shipments drop by one-third from last year, with market share at 9 percent.
The decline was blamed on a lack of product variety and the continued popularity of foreign big brands such as Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson, which together hold a 65 percent market share and increased shipments by 5 percent in the first quarter.
Phones with music capabilities and camera resolutions higher than 1 megapixel will continue to lure users through next year, the market researcher said.
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