Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶), the world’s second-largest contract PC maker, said yesterday it expects to see notebook shipments increase between 15 percent and 20 percent in the second quarter from last quarter’s 6.3 million units as the economy improves and contract order visibility increases to one-and-a-half months.
“For the month of May, we can see 80 to 90 percent visibility and for June somewhere around 60 to 70 percent visibility,” Ray Chen (陳瑞聰), Compal president told an investor conference yesterday.
The Neihu-based company yesterday booked 10.5 percent quarter-on-quarter growth for first quarter shipments or 3.2 percent growth year-on-year.
For the full year this year, Compal predicts a total of 32 million to 35 million units in notebook shipments, Chen said.
LCD GROUP
For its liquid-crystal-display (LCD) group, Chen yesterday forecast quarterly growth of between 10 percent and 15 percent for the second quarter, over the first quarter’s 67,000 units.
CULV NOTEBOOKS
As panel prices increase steadily over time, Compal expects its gross margin percentage to decline, but the value of the gross margin would remain unaffected, Chen said.
Chen said it is hard to see the impact now of the recent introduction of consumer ultra-low-voltage (CULV) notebooks by various companies, but perhaps by the fourth quarter, CULV notebooks could comprise 20 percent of the company’s global notebook shipments.
Chen also expected low-priced, Internet-enabled netbooks to take up between 25 percent and 30 percent of overall notebook volume, but he said he did not see Android-based notebooks becoming mainstream until the second half of next year at the earliest.
As netbook screen sizes increase this year to 11.6 inches, and are embedded with Menlo computer processing units, Chen said he believed this trend would affect approximately one-fourth of regular notebook sales at most, as regular laptop prices are dropping precipitously.
AVAILABILITY
Although the availability of various components was good, the executive said there could possibly be an LCD TV shortage, particularly for 32-inch and 37-inch screens.
“As LCD panel prices are starting to rise, notebook panels [availability] could tighten as demand picks up throughout the year and consumer demand increases sharply,” he said.
Last month, Compal posted a 13 percent year-on-year decline in first-quarter net profits at NT$2.80 billion (US$84.5 million), or NT$0.73 earnings per share.
Edward Yen (顏子傑), who rates the stock “buy” at UBS AG in Taipei, gives the company a price objective of NT$31.
Compal traded down NT$0.55 to NT$31.30 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday. The benchmark TAIEX inched up 0.09 percent.
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
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],”
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
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