Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), the world’s largest contract notebook computer maker, and its smaller rival Wistron Corp (緯創) yesterday both reported robust growth in consolidated revenue last month.
Quanta said its consolidated revenue last month hit a record high of NT$114.57 billion (US$3.95 billion), up 90.79 percent month-on-month and 24.2 percent year-on-year, mainly because of rising laptop shipments.
The company said in a statement that notebook shipments increased 78.13 percent to 5.7 million units last month from 3.2 million units in February. Quanta’s clients include Acer Inc (宏碁) of Taiwan and Hewlett-Packard Co of the US. The company also assembles the iPod Touch, Macbooks and iMacs for Apple Inc.
However, the month-on-month increase in sales and shipments could be attributed in part to fewer working days because of the Lunar New Year holiday in February, as well as shipments being postponed from February to last month because of problems with Intel Corp chipsets.
Intel announced in late January that it had discovered a flaw in its 6-Series chipset, which connects its second-generation Core processors (codenamed Sandy Bridge) to other parts of the PC system. That announcement prompted Quanta and several Taiwanese PC makers to stop shipments and sales of all of their products based on the Sandy Bridge chipset.
Revenue for the first quarter was down 12.3 percent sequentially to NT$251.29 billion, but up 1.99 percent on an annual basis, the company said.
Notebook shipments totaled 13.1 million units in the first three months, down nearly 9 percent from the previous quarter, but better than the company’s forecast of a decline of more than 10 percent because of Intel’s chipset recall. On an annual basis, shipments increased 19 percent.
Meanwhile, Wistron said its consolidated revenue reached NT$55.01 billion last month, up 49.9 percent month-on-month and 1.38 percent year-on-year.
The company shipped 2.6 million notebooks last month, 48 percent more than in February, it said in a statement. Notebook shipments in the first quarter totaled 6.6 million units, down 10.2 percent from the previous quarter.
However, first-quarter revenue was down 4.2 percent from a year earlier at NT$137.28 billion, said Wistron, which was spun off from Acer in 2003 and also sells non-notebook products such as LCD TVs, desktops, smart handhelds and LCD monitors.
Another notebook maker, Pegatron Corp (和碩), saw revenue surge 69.4 percent to NT$33.79 billion last month, helped by across-the-board increases in its three major product segments.
Pegatron is a contract manufacturing arm of Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), which yesterday said its unaudited revenue reached NT$24.25 billion last month, up 70.49 percent month-on-month but down 23.54 percent year-on-year.
In the first quarter, revenue totaled NT$58.33 billion, down 21.4 percent from the fourth quarter and 22 percent from a year earlier, Asustek said in a statement.
“Revenue from the computing segment more than doubled, while revenue from the communications and consumer electronics segments also saw double-digit growth,” the company said in an e-mailed statement.
However, last month’s figure was down 19 percent from a year earlier.
First-quarter revenue totaled NT$82.95 billion, down 22 percent from the previous quarter and 21.6 percent from a year ago.
Quanta’s biggest rival, Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦), is expected to release its financial results for last month and the first quarter next week.
Compal revised down its first-quarter shipment estimates early last month at an investor conference organized by Citigroup Global Markets, citing slowing growth in notebook demand and competition from tablet devices.
At the time, Compal said it expected to ship between 4 million and 4.5 million units last month, and between 10.4 million and 10.9 million notebooks for the first quarter.
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