US investment banks Merrill Lynch & Co and Citigroup have lowered their third-quarter notebook shipment growth estimates for Taiwanese manufacturers for the year.
Merrill Lynch revised its figure from 25 percent to 22 percent, while Citigroup lowered its forecast from 24 percent to 23 percent.
The country’s top five notebook contract makers reported an average month-on-month decline of 6 percent last month, which was lower than market expectations because some shipments were delayed to this month or the fourth quarter.
Out of the five original design manufacturers (ODMs) analyzed, Inventec Co (英業達) led the pack last month, with shipments up 17 percent month-on-month.
Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦) and Wistron Corp (緯創) performed the worst in the group — each with shipments down 15 percent — while Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦) saw a milder drop of 6 percent.
Since most PC vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co, Dell Inc, Acer Inc (宏碁) and Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), are expecting a rise in orders, Citigroup anticipates this month’s notebook shipments from Taiwan’s top-five ODMs will grow 22 percent month-on-month.
Merrill Lynch predicted similar figures for this month.
Both brokerage firms attributed the demand shift toward low-price netbooks to be the main driver of overall notebook shipments and have incorporated netbook shipments into the notebook figures for the top-five ODMs.
The US brokerages both expressed concern over potential restricted supply of plastic casings through the end of the year.
“Even though NB [notebook] ODMs have not seen any major order cuts from PC OEMs yet, NB ODMs are worried that shortage of IMR [industrial molded rubber] plastic casings could be the swing factor for NB shipments in September and October,” Citigroup analyst Eve Jung (戎宜蘋) wrote in a research note on Thursday.
Citigroup also offered a preliminary fourth-quarter forecast, saying that notebook shipments from the top-five NB ODMs would grow 15 percent quarter-on-quarter, with netbook shipments potentially accounting for 11 percent of total shipments next quarter.
Jung said she would revise the figures once there is more visibility next month.
Apart from lowering their third-quarter shipment forecasts, Merrill and Citigroup also revised their third-quarter estimates for motherboard shipments after last month’s shipments dropped 17 percent year-on-year, compared with market forecasts of a 7 percent decline.
Merrill Lynch technology analyst Tony Tseng (曾省吾) said yesterday motherboard shipments would only grow 9 percent in the third quarter from the previous quarter, primarliy because of the continued consumer trend toward ultra-mobile netbooks.
Jung was slightly more optimistic about motherboard shipments, forecasting 12 percent quarter-on-quarter growth in the third quarter, compared with a historical average of 21.6 percent growth quarter-on-quarter.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts