Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦), the world’s second-largest laptop PC contract maker, continued to see weaker momentum as it posted consolidated sales of NT$59.78 billion (US$2 billion) last month, down 18 percent from last year.
The figure was up 0.5 percent from a month ago.
Compal’s total revenue from January to last month was NT$639.51 billion, down 22.3 percent from last year.
The drop in this year’s sales was attributed to a major client cutting notebook shipments, as well as the cannibalization of netbooks by tablet PCs, a company investor relations official said.
Acer Inc (宏碁) placed fewer orders with Compal this year as the former lost market share amid company restructuring.
With the overall netbook market seeing a decline in shipments this year, Compal — which was highly exposed to the netbook segment last year — saw total sales drop substantially this year, the official added.
The floods in Thailand during the fourth quarter also took a toll on the maker’s shipments and the company is “reserved” about its prospects into the first quarter of next year, she added.
Compal shipped 3 million units of notebook PCs last month, down from 3.2 million in the previous month.
Total shipments for the year look set to hit in the lower range of the 40 million to 42 million units that it targeted in October.
The maker vowed to ship as many as 48 million units of portable PCs at the beginning of the year.
With Compal forming a joint venture with China’s PC giant Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) next year, other branded clients decided to place fewer orders with Compal on concerns about the alliance, said Cheng Kai-ming (鄭開明), an analyst with Horizon Securities (宏遠證券).
However, Lenovo is set to usher in robust PC momentum next year thanks to booming domestic demand and the alliance should be able to compensate for Compal’s loss of other orders, he added.
Separately, Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s No. 4 PC brand, yesterday posted sales of NT$35.76 billion last month, down 12.18 percent from the same month last year.
Total revenue for the first 11 months of the year plunged 23.52 percent to NT$372.68 billion, according to a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by