Citigroup yesterday lowered its forecast for growth of global PC shipments this year to 13 percent from 15 percent on concerns of slowing demand amid global financial turmoil.
The US brokerage also substantially lowered its growth forecast for next year to 5 percent from a range between 10 percent and 12 percent, Richard Gardner, a Citigroup Global Markets analyst, said in a client note yesterday.
“We expect the sharpest slowing in Europe where several US vendors have already implemented price increases to offset the recent strengthening in the [US] dollar,” Gardner wrote.
The Citigroup analyst also cut his earnings forecast for Dell Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and JAVA in the second half of the year and for next year and 2010 to reflect the impact of the global credit crisis and changes in currency values.
Citigroup’s downward adjustments for major US PC vendors are expected to cast a cloud on the outlook for Taiwan’s leading computer contract makers, such as Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦) and Wistron Corp (緯創).
Last month, Compal Electronics president Ray Chen (陳瑞聰) said the world’s second-largest contract laptop maker would lower its shipment forecast to between 28 million and 29 million units this year, down from 32 million units.
Quanta Computer, the No. 1 contract laptop maker, also reduced its forecast to 38 million units this year from 40 million, Bloomberg reported yesterday, citing chief financial officer Tim Li (李杜榮).
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
RSS