With unfavorable foreign exchange rates and a tightening credit capacity, Acer Inc (宏碁) reported a 31.4 percent drop in net profits for the first quarter compared with the same period last year, the company said yesterday.
Net profits were NT$2.03 billion (US$61 million) in the first three months, or NT$0.78 earnings per share, compared with NT$2.95 billion a year earlier.
Revenues and operating income also declined 7 percent and 6 percent year-on-year to NT$119.09 billion and NT$2.57 billion respectively in the first quarter.
The world’s third-largest personal computer and second-largest notebook vendor lowered its forecast for netbook shipments for this year to between 10 million and 12 million units from 12 million to 15 million units at an investor conference yesterday and said that netbooks would not contribute to revenues in the second quarter.
Acer president Gianfranco Lanci said the company was not considering producing Android-based notebooks, as it sees it as more of a smartphone platform than a heavy-duty computing platform.
The Taipei-based brand aims to be the world’s No. 1 notebook vendor by 2011, taking the emphasis off being No. 1 in total PC sales as the desktop PC business continues its steady decline, Lanci said.
Lanci said Acer’s main focus was to be the global leader in smartphones and be No. 1 in that market by next year, which is a sharp departure from the firm’s previous statements on PC dominance.
Last year, Acer’s PC shipments grew 26.7 percent year-on-year, compared with Hewlett-Packard Co’s 2.6 percent rise and a decline of 6 percent at Dell Inc, data provided by Gartner Inc showed.
Without giving specific guidance for the second quarter, the company said gross margin would remain at 2.2 percent.
“Acer expects 50 percent of revenues to come from the Aspire Timeline series of notebooks this year,” Acer chairman Wang Jeng-tang (王振堂) said.
Going forward, Wang believes Acer is setting new standards in global computing with its Timeline series running on Intel Corp’s consumer ultra-low voltage (CULV) platform and is ahead of the game by six to nine months.
He also stands by Acer’s multi-brand strategy.
“As PCs become a commodity, a single brand simply cannot cover all the user categories. With five to six pricing points, we have clearly delineated the brands and products to grow our global market share,” Wang said.
Six Taiwanese companies, including contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), made the 2025 Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s largest firms by revenue. In a report published by New York-based Fortune magazine on Tuesday, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (better known as Foxconn) ranked highest among Taiwanese firms, placing 28th with revenue of US$213.69 billion. Up 60 spots from last year, TSMC rose 60 places to reach No. 126 with US$90.16 billion in revenue, followed by Quanta Computer Inc. at 348th, Pegatron Corp. at 461st, CPC Corp., Taiwan at 494th and Wistron Corp. at 496th. According to Fortune, the world’s
NEW PRODUCTS: MediaTek plans to roll out new products this quarter, including a flagship mobile phone chip and a GB10 chip that it is codeveloping with Nvidia Corp MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday projected that revenue this quarter would dip by 7 to 13 percent to between NT$130.1 billion and NT$140 billion (US$4.38 billion and US$4.71 billion), compared with NT$150.37 billion last quarter, which it attributed to subdued front-loading demand and unfavorable foreign exchange rates. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said that the forecast factored in the negative effects of an estimated 6 percent appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar against the greenback. “As some demand has been pulled into the first half of the year and resulted in a different quarterly pattern, we expect the third quarter revenue to decline sequentially,”
WEAKER ACTIVITY: The sharpest deterioration was seen in the electronics and optical components sector, with the production index falling 13.2 points to 44.5 Taiwan’s manufacturing sector last month contracted for a second consecutive month, with the purchasing managers’ index (PMI) slipping to 48, reflecting ongoing caution over trade uncertainties, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The decline reflects growing caution among companies amid uncertainty surrounding US tariffs, semiconductor duties and automotive import levies, and it is also likely linked to fading front-loading activity, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “Some clients have started shifting orders to Southeast Asian countries where tariff regimes are already clear,” Lien told a news conference. Firms across the supply chain are also lowering stock levels to mitigate
DIVERSIFYING: Taiwanese investors are reassessing their preference for US dollar assets and moving toward Europe amid a global shift away from the greenback Taiwanese investors are reassessing their long-held preference for US-dollar assets, shifting their bets to Europe in the latest move by global investors away from the greenback. Taiwanese funds holding European assets have seen an influx of investments recently, pushing their combined value to NT$13.7 billion (US$461 million) as of the end of last month, the highest since 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Over the first half of this year, Taiwanese investors have also poured NT$14.1 billion into Europe-focused funds based overseas, bringing total assets up to NT$134.8 billion, according to data from the Securities Investment Trust and Consulting Association (SITCA),
RSS