Acer Inc (宏碁) yesterday slashed its tablet computer shipment target for this year by half to between 2.5 million and 3 million units amid tight competition from Apple Inc and Asustek Inc (華碩).
The company had said earlier it aimed to take the No. 2 tablet player spot after Apple by shipping 5 million to 7 million tablet PCs.
Acer is expected to ship 800,000 tablets in the three months ending June 30 and hopes to achieve the same volume for the third quarter, company president Jim Wong (翁建仁) told reporters after the firm’s annual general meeting.
Photo: CNA
Asustek last week said it expected to ship 400,000 tablets in the second quarter, up from its original target of 300,000. Its full-year shipment target of 2 million tablets remains intact, Asustek said.
“We don’t want to have excess inventory piling up in the fourth quarter [by shipping too many tablets to retailers],” Acer chairman and CEO J.T. Wang (王振堂) said.
Acer early this month wrote off US$150 million in losses to help its EMEA — Europe, the Middle East and Africa — channels cut excess inventory.
The company is also streamlining its EMEA operation by axing about 300 employees, a move that will cost it US$30 million.
The EMEA unit was headed by CEO and president Gianfranco Lanci, who was dismissed by Acer’s board in March for missing quarterly targets and a strategic failure to steer the company through the race for smartphones and tablets.
Wong was appointed to take over Lanci.
Acer’s PC shipments in the second quarter could drop 10 percent over the first because of organizational restructuring, Wang said.
Overall, third-quarter business should be flat or better than the second quarter, with the fourth quarter picking up from the third, he added.
“We are seeing ‘lukewarm’ growth in the second half,” Wang said, adding that it would slowly bottom out from the second quarter.
Acer’s shareholders approved a proposal to distribute cash dividends of NT$3.60 per share and reduce employee bonuses by 40 percent to NT$900 million (US$31 million).
Shareholders also elected a new board of directors and supervisors for a three-year term.
New to the board are independent directors Tseng Fan-cheng (曾繁城) and Julian Horn-Smith.
Tseng co-founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) as a pioneer specializing in “foundry-only” semiconductor manufacturing.
Horn-Smith was a founding member of Vodafone Group and regarded as the principal architect in developing Vodafone’s international strategy. He retired from Vodafone’s board in July 2006, where he held the title of deputy CEO.
Acer said the changes would create a strong and well-rounded team that could lead the company forward and enhance corporate governance.
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
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
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