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.
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