Wistron Corp (緯創), the nation’s third-largest electronics contract maker, said yesterday it expected to meet its full-year forecast of 25 million units of notebook shipments this year, while maintaining its gross margin of around 6 percent.
The company, formerly a manufacturing subsidiary of Acer Inc (宏碁), also said that its unit shipments across all product categories would grow 15 percent quarter-on-quarter this quarter and another 10 percent next quarter.
“The notebook business line is still Wistron’s major revenue contributor,” company chairman and chief executive officer Simon Lin (林憲銘) told an investor conference yesterday.
“Though we do see growth opportunities in the second half, we’re not as optimistic as our competitors,” he said.
Wistron regards companies like Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) as competitors, rather than electronics manufacturing services providers such as Flextronis International Ltd, he said.
The chairman said TVs should enjoy a higher gross margin than notebooks in the second half and said the liquid-crystal-display (LCD) TV business would be a growth engine for the firm going into next year.
The company’s guidance for notebooks and TVs next year are 20 percent and 100 percent unit growth rates compared with this year’s anticipated shipment of 25 million and 3 million units respectively.
Monitors and desktops will see up to 40 percent and 80 percent year-on-year unit shipment increases next year, Lin said.
Unlike local rivals, Wistron does not have a plan to engage in vertical integration by producing plastic casings or camera modules in house. Instead, the company invests in component suppliers to reduce its overall production costs, he said.
Lin said he did not see consumer ultra-low voltage (CULV) notebooks becoming mainstream until next year and many of its customers were not heavily engaged in rolling out low-priced netbooks.
Wistron posted consolidated first-half revenues of NT$239.77 billion (US$7.3 billion) and after-tax earnings of NT$3.3 billion yesterday, which represent yearly declines of 8.19 percent and 31.02 percent respectively.
Amid recent financial setbacks, Wistron reported improvements quarter-on-quarter for the three months ending in June — attributed mainly to enlarged business scale, product mix and increased efficiency, Lin said.
In the second quarter, sales rose 13.08 percent to NT$127.24 billion from the first and after-tax profit climbed 31.68 percent to NT$1.88 billion, with earnings per share of NT$1.22, the company said.
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