Buoyed by improved consumer sentiment and market demand, the nation’s top five PC contract makers are expected to ship a total of 9.56 million units next month, which represents a 7.7 percent increase over this month, Merrill Lynch said earlier this week.
Shipments from the five companies — Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶), Inventec Co (英業達), Wistron Corp (緯創) and Pegatron Corp (和碩) — should total 27.59 million units in the second quarter, up 11 percent from the first quarter and 9 percent from a year ago, Merrill Lynch said in a report on Wednesday.
NEW MODELS
Local PC companies will demonstrate netbook models with new hardware and operating systems, notebooks supported by the consumer ultra low voltage (CULV) platform and all-in-one PCs at next week’s Computex fair.
Manufacturers have high hopes this year’s Computex will help boost orders for later this year.
But Merrill Lynch said in the report that squeezed margins at international PC vendors would likely increase pressure on the Taiwanese supply chain in the second half of the year.
The report attributed the shrinking profitability of major PC brands to the continued fall in the average selling prices of notebooks, which is expected to extend into the third quarter; the rising prices of liquid-crystal displays (LCD) and dynamic random access memory (DRAM), and, most importantly, lukewarm consumer demand.
REVIEW
Merrill Lynch will “review the PC sector later this year when expectations have been lowered and we have better visibility of platform transitions at Intel Corp and Microsoft Corp in particular,” Taipei-based analyst Tony Tseng (曾省吾) wrote in the report.
As for local PC component suppliers, Merrill Lynch expected revenues this month to be flat or fall month-on-month, hurt by PC shipment shortfalls last month and this month.
The shortfalls were the result of companies ramping up new models slowly, tight component supplies for optical digital discs and LCDs and the appreciation of the NT dollar against the greenback, the report said.
“Chicony Electronics Co [群光] and Pegatron have both lowered their second-quarter guidance from 20 percent growth to 15 percent quarter-on-quarter. We are therefore trimming our second-quarter estimate [in the component sector] from 12 percent growth to 11 percent quarter-on-quarter,” the report said.
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