Inventec Corp (英業達), the world’s No. 4 contract laptop maker, forecasts better prospects for PC shipments in the second half of this year and is increasing shipments of non-notebook products to raise its profit margin, the company chairman said on Thursday.
“The PC market will not grow much in the second quarter because vendors are shifting from their old models to new ones,” Inventec chairman Richard Lee (李詩欽) said, but added that growth would pick up pace in the third and fourth quarters.
“The impact of an Intel chip recall will last only one month, with total PC shipments continuing to grow from March,” he said.
Lee made the remarks on the sidelines of a lunch gathering organized by the Cloud Computing Association of Taiwan, in which he serves as vice president.
For the full year, Inventec aims to ship 20 million notebooks, while combined shipments of higher-margin products, including tablet PCs, e-readers and “smart books” — a cloud computing-based computer without a hard disk — could reach 10 million units this year, he said.
The company expects quarterly shipments of e-readers to exceed 1 million units, compared with about 800,000 units in the fourth quarter of last year.
“So far, we are the only worldwide supplier of color e-readers, and we will soon begin shipments of similar products with 3G [third-generation] wireless communication capabilities,” Lee said.
As for its server business, Lee said annual sales growth had been stable at 25 to 30 percent for the past few years, while volume shipments had increased at a higher rate.
Last year, 30 percent of the 8 million servers shipped worldwide were made by Inventec, making it the world’s No. 1 contract server manufacturer.
Inventec and its affiliates agreed on Jan. 27 to acquire a 47.97 percent stake in solar cell maker E-Ton Solar Tech Co (益通) for NT$5.06 billion (US$172 million) to gain a foothold in the renewable energy business.
“The solar cell market has been developing at a far faster pace than we had imagined, so we decided to acquire E-Ton instead of building a plant or buying equipment ourselves,” Lee said.
The combined production of E-Ton and Inventec’s solar cell units is expected to reach 1 gigawatt by the end of this year, pushing Inventec closer to its target of becoming one of the world’s top three solar cell makers, Lee said.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to