Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), the world’s largest contract maker of laptop computers by shipments, posted consolidated revenues of NT$88.6 billion (US$2.91 billion) last month, down 4.8 percent from August and a decline of 8.4 percent from a year earlier, the company said in an e-mailed statement on Saturday.
In the July-to-September quarter, revenues rose slightly by 0.14 percent to NT$267.25 billion from the second quarter, but were down 0.77 percent from a year ago. In the first nine months of the year, revenues totaled NT$785.42 billion, down 2.49 percent from the same period last year, the company said in the statement.
Quanta makes Macbooks for Apple Inc. It also supplies laptops to major customers such as Acer Inc (宏碁), Hewlett-Packard Co (HP), Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), Sony Corp and Toshiba Corp.
Last month, Quanta shipped 5 million portable PCs, the same amount as in August. In the third quarter, the company shipped 14.5 million units, down 1.4 percent from the second quarter.
Ahead of Friday’s shipment results, Barclays Capital had already forecast that Quanta would see a weak sequential growth of 2 percent, because of the company's high exposure to mature markets and consumer segments that have been negatively impacted by the general economic uncertainty and weak back-to-school demand.
During the first nine months, the company's total laptop shipments have hit 41.9 million units. In the whole year, Quanta is expected to grow 10 percent in shipments to 57.3 million units, spokesman and chief financial executive Elton Yang (楊俊烈) said last month.
Meanwhile, with the weakening world economy and global stock market rout over the past few months, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) did not escape the strong macroeconomic headwinds completely unscathed.
The world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics by sales said its unconsolidated revenues last month were up 3.43 percent month-on-month, but down 12.5 percent year-on-year to NT$221.78 billion, according to a company release issued on Friday.
The Taiwanese maker of Sony TVs, HP printers and Apple iPhones and iPads said that third-quarter revenues increased 5.01 percent quarter-on-quarter to NT$665.66 billion, but dropped 0.18 percent year-on-year.
In the first nine months, Hon Hai saw its unaudited revenues expand 16.3 percent year-on-year to NT$1.85 trillion, the company 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