Wistron Corp (緯創), the nation’s No. 3 notebook contract maker, is expecting to see average growth of 30 percent in shipments across major product lines next year, a company executive said yesterday.
“We will gain better momentum in 2011,” company chief executive Simon Lin (林憲銘) told investors, attributing the growth to the company’s diversification into non-notebook products such as smartphones, LCD TVs, monitors and desktops, from notebook manufacturing.
Revenue from the non-notebook segment will rise to contribute 45 percent of the company’s revenue next year, from 35 percent this year, Lin said.
Notebook contract manufacturing business in Taiwan has been crowded with many players including Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) competing for space, and that drove down companies’ profit margins.
However, Wistron still expects laptop shipments to grow by between 27 percent and 35 percent next year to between 35 million and 37 million units, from an estimate of 27.5 million laptop computers this year.
According to Lin, global laptop and netbook shipments next year will grow between 15 percent and 18 percent from this year’s 200 million units. The growth has been lowered by the rise of tablets, he said.
Lin said Wistron is going to add on two more tablet clients to the current four, which come from both the PC and smartphone fields.
He said he thinks that Apple Inc is set to seize the largest market share for the tablet sector next year and how well iPad-like devices from other makers are received by the market will depend on how they bundle the software into the hardware.
Wistron will ship about 1 million tablets next year, which is a small portion of total notebook shipments, but the figure will grow “significantly” from 2012 onwards, he said.
The company yesterday reported record revenue and profits for the third quarter.
On a quarter-over-quarter basis, revenue in the third quarter increased by 8.9 percent to NT$162.14 billion (US$5.1 billion) and profits rose 10.7 percent to NT$3.27 billion.
Operating margins improved to 2.35 percent from 2.32 percent in the second quarter, mainly because of an enlarged business scale, a different product mix and increased efficiency, according to a company statement.
According to Grand Cathay Securities Co (大華投顧) analyst Lisa Chen (陳玫芬), Wistron will enjoy strong growth next year in LCD TV and smartphone shipments, saying these two show the most potential of all its non-notebook products.
Shipments of LCD TVs and smartphones are expected to double to 10 million and 12 million next year respectively, she said.
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