Higher shipments of its products across the board have pushed up the sales of Wistron Corp (緯創) for last month, ending two consecutive months of decline.
The Hsinchu-based company, the world’s third-biggest contract notebook producer, posted NT$58.42 billion (US$1.99 billion) in consolidated revenue, up 26.82 percent from the NT$46.06 billion a month earlier, the company said in a statement.
However, last month’s figure was still 7.74 percent lower than the NT$63.32 billion it posted a year earlier, the company’s data showed.
THIRD QUARTER
As a result, Wistron saw its third-quarter revenue drop 3.5 percent sequentially to NT$153.32 billion and down 7.98 percent from the year before.
On Aug. 24. chairman Simon Lin (林憲銘) told investors that the company’s performance in the third quarter would likely be flat from the second quarter mainly because of lower notebook shipments, but he forecast an improved fourth quarter driven by higher shipments of new products.
SALES REPORT
The company’s latest sales report showed its notebook shipments rose to 2.9 million units last month, from 2.2 million units in August, thanks mainly to customers restocking their inventories ahead of the Oct. 26 launch of touchscreen Windows 8 notebooks.
However, total notebook shipments in the third quarter dropped 4.5 percent to 7.45 million units from the second quarter and an earlier survey carried out by Deutsche Securities suggested notebook orders would remain weak in the fourth quarter, as downstream customers appeared cautious about market demand for the new Windows 8 products.
For the whole of this year, the company left its notebook shipment target unchanged at a range between 33 million units and 35 million units.
NON-NOTEBOOK LINEUP
Wistron said it saw increased sales in most of its non-notebook product lineup last month, with shipments in hand-held devices, LCD TVs and servers reaching 1 million, 350,000 and 150,000 units respectively, while those of desktop PCs and LCD monitors were steady at 1 million and 700,000 units each.
During the first nine months of the year, the company said total sales increased 5.62 percent year-on-year to NT$489.12 billion.
QUANTA
Meanwhile, Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), the world’s largest contract notebook maker, said yesterday it shipped 4.7 million notebooks last month, up from 4.2 million notebooks in August, lifting the company’s third-quarter notebook shipments to 13.4 million units.
That was an improvement over the 13.1 million units for the first quarter.
However, the third-quarter shipments were lower than the 13.9 million units it shipped in the second quarter and did not meet the company’s vice chairman and president C.C. Leung’s (梁次震) forecast made on Aug. 30 for an increase of about 1 percent to 2 percent sequentially.
Therefore, the Linkou (林口), Taoyuan County-based company said in a statement that its consolidated revenue last month was NT$83.5 billion, which was slightly lower than the NT$83.61 billion in the previous month and 5.76 percent lower than the NT$88.6 billion for the same period of the previous year.
Third-quarter revenue totaled NT$256.1 billion, up 7.82 percent from the second quarter. However, sales from January to last month were NT$711.85 billion, down 9.37 percent year-on-year.
Leung in August forecast that revenue in the fourth quarter would rise from last quarter and revenue for the whole year would also increase from last year.
Additional reporting by George Liao
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