Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), the world’s largest notebook computer original design manufacturer service supplier, said yesterday it might not meet its notebook shipment target for the fourth quarter of this year because of weakening global demand.
Quanta said its shipments during this quarter were also affected by a hard-disk drive shortage because of serious flooding in Thailand, a major supplier of the component.
The firm said it expected fourth-quarter shipments to fall below the 14.5 million units shipped in the July-to-September period, after having projected shipments to stay level quarter-on-quarter.
Quanta’s shipments fell to 4.4 million units last month from 5.3 million units in October.
The company said demand this month has been even weaker than last month, leaving it pessimistic about hitting the 14.5 million units target.
For the year as a whole, Quanta said its shipments are expected to reach the lower end of its target range of an increase of betweeen 5 percent and 10 percent from the 52.1 million units shipped last year.
In the first 11 months of the year, Quanta posted sales of NT$989.52 billion (US$32.66 billion), down 0.6 percent from a year earlier, with notebook shipments at 51.6 million.
Quanta’s latest warning echoed US chipmaker Intel Corp’s recent downgrade of its sales forecast for the fourth quarter. The US company cited weakening global PC demand and PC production disruptions caused by disk-drive shortages as factors behind the lower estimate.
Last week, Barclays Capital also lowered its year-on-year growth forecast for this year’s global PC shipments to only 2.2 percent from 3.4 percent, citing the weakest fourth-quarter demand for the past 10 years. It said notebook shipments would fall 2 percent in the fourth quarter from the previous quarter, far worse than the normal seasonality of 14 percent growth.
Quanta said that because the global economic slowdown is likely to continue casting a shadow over the PC sector, it remains cautious over prospects for the first quarter of next year.
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