Acer Inc (宏碁), the world's No. 4 PC brand, said yesterday its PC shipments would be in a range of minus-5 percent to 5 percent this quarter from last quarter, after last quarter’s shipments fell 11 percent from the second quarter.
The Taipei-based company’s new shipment projection reflects its cautious stance toward market demand for Microsoft Corp’s new operating system, although Acer said it would continue rolling out touch-screen gadgets supported by Windows 8.
Despite concerns whether Windows 8 will be popular, Acer has moved to reduce channel inventories of its Windows 7 products, Acer president Jim Wong (翁建仁) told investors at a conference in Taipei.
“In response to a downward trend in sales of Windows 7 in the third quarter, we aim to lower our channel inventories to avoid obstacles for the launch of Windows 8,” Wong said.
Acer chairman Wang Jeng-tang (王振堂) said Apple Inc, Google Inc, Amazon Inc and Microsoft Corp have brought dramatic changes to the PC industry, a situation Acer has not seen over the past 20 years.
“To avoid the ‘negative chain reaction over the [PC] ecosystem,’ Acer will continue to work with other brands to share the prosperity. Take our cloud-computing services for example: Acer’s cloud is complementary with any other brand, such as Alibaba (阿里巴巴) and Google. We believe such a feature can assist users to manage personal data across platforms and devices, and therefore enhance customer loyalty,” Wang said.
On Tuesday, Acer reported its third-quarter net profit of NT$68 million (US$2.3 million), up 21 percent quarter-on-quarter, with earnings per share (EPS) of NT$0.03, compared with a net loss of NT$1.09 billion in the third quarter of last year.
Operating income was NT$345 million in the third quarter, compared with NT$433 million in the previous quarter and losses of NT$1.32 billion a year earlier. Revenue was NT$104.41 billion last quarter, down 6 percent from NT$110.55 billion in the second quarter and 11 percent from NT$117.9 billion a year ago, the company’s data showed.
Beginning this quarter, Acer expects the market to see more PCs equipped with touch-screen features thanks to the launch of Windows 8.
With regard to its pricing strategies, Wong said Acer will set prices for its touch-screen products between US$499 and US$1,499.
“Specifically, Acer CloudMobile S500 will be our focus. We seek to provide our customers mobilities with date devices. That’s why we never give up smartphones,” he said.
Whether Windows 8 products will take significant market shares or not depends on the users, analysts have said.
“The introduction of Windows 8 is a new beginning. We think the market has huge potential,” Wang said.
The company will adopt a conservative approach to Windows 8 products, according to how soon consumers can actually experience the product and how fast the company can ship products to meet market demand, he said.
“I consider this is the darkest time before the storm,” Wang said. “It is all about timing.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts