Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), the world’s largest PC original design manufacturer (ODM), yesterday said its overall shipments for this quarter would be flat from last quarter, but expected stronger growth next quarter on a variety of Windows 8 devices.
“The touch function of Windows 8 will generate a great number of new applications, especially for commercial purposes, and that will stimulate another big wave of PC replacement demand beginning from the fourth quarter and into next year,” Quanta chairman and CEO Barry Lam (林百里) said in an investor conference. “The increased demand will become more evident next year and will in turn drive up our shipment.”
The company shipped 13.9 million notebooks in the second quarter after 13.1 million units in the first quarter.
C.C. Leung (梁次震), Quanta vice chairman and president, said shipments this quarter would increase about 1 percent to 2 percent sequentially and forecast the full-year shipment would increase about 4 percent to 5 percent from last year.
Quanta has been looking to tablets and cloud-computing data center hardwares in search of products with higher profitability than notebooks, although the shipment of its non-notebook segment still accounted for a little more than 30 percent of the total during the first six months.
Leung said overall non-notebook shipments in the second half would increase from the first half, while shipments of tablet PCs would grow 70 percent this year from last year. He did not elaborate.
He forecast revenue in the fourth quarter to go up from this quarter and revenue for the whole year also to go up from last year.
The company yesterday posted a net income of NT$5.99 billion (US$202.43 million) for last quarter, up 17.4 percent from NT$5.1 billion in the previous quarter and up 11.6 percent from NT$5.37 billion a year ago. Earnings per share were NT$1.56 last quarter, compared with NT$1.33 the previous quarter and NT$1.4 a year ago.
Revenue was NT$237.52 billion last quarter, increasing 0.5 percent from NT$236.22 billion in the first quarter but decreasing 13.4 percent from NT$274.39 billion in the corresponding period last year.
Gross margin and operating margin last quarter were 3.8 percent and 1.2 percent respectively, compared with 4.2 percent and 1.8 percent in the preceding quarter and 3.4 percent and 1.3 percent a year ago.
JPMorgan analyst Gokul Hariharan said ahead of Quanta’s release of its second-quarter results that he expected the company to show a steady margin improvement in the coming quarters, driven by better product mix and better pricing in notebooks.
Revenue momentum in the second half should be stronger, thanks to the launch of new tablet models and increasing shipments of the new 13-inch Apple Macbook Pro notebooks from late in the third quarter, the brokerage said.
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