Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s third-largest computer maker, doesn’t expect to maintain this year’s rate of sales growth in Germany next year, said Wilfried Thom, head of Acer’s consumer business in the country.
“We are having a really unbelievable year,” and sales are going up, Thom said on Friday in an interview at the IFA consumer electronics conference in Berlin. “We don’t think we’ll have this kind of growth again next year, because both this year and last year we had strong growth.”
The company predicts sales will “consolidate” next year, he said. “That means that if you’re coming from 17 percent or 18 percent market share to 30 percent, it won’t continue to grow at the same pace.”
This week, the Taipei-based computer maker’s shares rose to a 3.5-year high in Taipei trading after it forecast laptop shipments may increase as much as 40 percent in the third quarter from the previous three months.
“At the moment the situation” for Acer in Germany “is much better than everybody expected six months ago,” Thom said. “The question is what happens in the third or fourth quarter, when unemployment is expected to rise.”
Currently, Acer has 19 percent of the overall notebook and netbook market in Germany, Thom said.
For consumer products overall, it has about one-third of the market, he said.
Acer’s business with companies has been much weaker than that with consumers. Recently, the number of government contracts for which Acer can bid has been growing, Thom said.
“There are a lot of offers we have to send out and that looks really good, but the private sector is still struggling,” he said.
Business-to-business sales makes up one third of Acer’s total revenue, Thom said.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by