Revenues of Taiwan’s telecommunications industry fell 6 percent last quarter from a year ago, due to slow seasonal demand and reduced shipments from cellphone manufacturers, a local market researcher said last week.
Taiwan’s telecommunications industry made NT$309 billion (US$10.42 billion) in revenue last quarter, down from NT$328.6 billion a year earlier, according to a report released by Industry & Technology Intelligence Services.
On a quarterly basis, that was a 14 percent decrease from NT$359.1 billion in the fourth quarter.
Traditionally, the first quarter is a weak season for both enterprise procurement and the telecommunications market, the report said.
Without new smartphones to compete gainst Apple Inc’s iPhone 4S launch last quarter and other rivals, HTC Corp’s (宏達電) revenues declined significantly in the first quarter, dragging down Taiwan’s first quarter smartphone shipment performance, ITIS said.
HTC’s weakness has brought down revenue of local makers of mobile devices — handsets and navigators — to NT$123.8 billion, representing an annual decline of 17.8 percent, from NT$150.5 billion, ITIS’s statistics indicated. That was a quarterly drop of 23.8 percent from NT$162.5 billion.
Mobile devices accounted for a 40 percent share of the nation’s telecommunications industry total revenue last quarter.
Overall revenues of Taiwan’s cellphone industry plunged 18.6 percent last quarter to NT$103.8 billion from the same quarter last year, according to the report. ITIS did not provide comparative figures.
That was despite an increase in orders from Nokia for Taiwanese contract handset makers, ITIS said.
In the subsector of wireless local area networks (WLAN), smart mobile handheld devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are still the driving force for the growth of WiFi modules, as opposed to the flat contribution from notebooks, the report said.
Even though the country’s overall shipment of WLAN equipment increased in the first quarter, the revenues generated by this subsector still declined 11 percent from the previous quarter and 1.8 percent from the same period last year due to failing WiFi chip prices, ITIS’s tally showed.
Shipment of Ethernet LAN switches in the first quarter turned conservative after restocking in the fourth quarter last year, causing revenues to drop 16.9 percent quarter-on-quarter.
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