Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s biggest electronics manufacturing service provider, posted a decline of 4.58 percent in sales last month to NT$231.78 billion (US$7.58 billion) from October, according to a company statement released on Friday.
The unconsolidated sales figure for last month have now fallen for two straight months since September when the company reported a record monthly sales of NT$253.48 billion, but it was still 57.25 percent more than the NT$147.39 billion in sales recorded a year earlier, the -company’s financial data showed.
Hon Hai did not elaborate on the sales results in the statement, but the 4.58 percent monthly decline in sales to NT$231.78 billion last month was worse than the 2 percent fall to NT$238 billion forecast by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, suggesting the demand for consumer electronics and personal computers is not as strong as expected ahead of the year-end holiday shopping season.
In the first 11 months of the year, Hon Hai — which makes Sony TVs, HP printers and Apple’s iPhones and iPads — saw its un-audited revenue expand 60.66 percent year-on-year to NT$2.07 trillion, the company said in the statement.
The cumulative sales of NT$2.07 trillion so far this year makes Hon Hai the first private company to break the NT$2 trillion mark in Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s second-largest PC brand after Hewlett-Packard Co by shipments, reported an increase of 8.84 percent in sales last month from October, but a decline of 11.97 percent from a year earlier, according to a company’s press release.
The Taipei-based company posted NT$40.71 billion in sales last month, compared with NT$37.41 billion in October and NT$46.25 billion in the same period last year, company data showed.
However, Friday’s figures were released on an unconsolidated basis, which may not fully reflect the company’s real business performance for the month.
During the first 11 months of the year, cumulative sales totaled NT$487.28 billion, up 11.67 percent from a year earlier, the company said in the release.
Shares in Hon Hai have declined 25.08 percent to NT$113.5 so far this year, while those in Acer have edged down 0.73 percent to NT$95.5, under--performing the benchmark TAIEX’s 6.48 percent rise over the same period, data from the Taiwan Stock Exchange showed.
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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],”
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