Casetek Holdings Ltd (鎧勝), one of Apple Inc’s MacBook and iPad casing suppliers, on Monday reported that sales last month fell 28.88 percent year-on-year as its biggest client enters a new product cycle.
On an annual basis, Casetek’s sales last month dropped to NT$2.01 billion (US$67.26 million) — the lowest level this year — from NT$2.83 billion a year ago, the company said.
For the first five months of the year, Casetek’s sales were up 47.47 percent to NT$14.47 billion compared with the same period last year.
“Apple’s product transition, particularly its iPad and iPad Mini tablets, is the main cause of the drop,” Fubon Securities Co (富邦證券) analyst Arthur Liao (廖顯毅) said by telephone yesterday.
Because of the strong demand for the iPad Mini, shipments of Apple’s MacBook series dropped and therefore affected Casetek’s sales, Liao added.
Casetek chairman Tung Tsu-hsien (童子賢) told investors in April that he remained “cautiously optimistic” about the company’s prospects despite a lower-than-expected sales guidance from Apple, its largest revenue source.
At a shareholders’ meeting on Tuesday last week, Tung said that the company’s factory utilization for the second half of the year is “fully loaded” because of increased orders from clients.
In other news, rival Foxconn Technology Co (鴻準), which also makes metal computer casings, reported on Monday that its sales last month increased 10.6 percent month-on-month to NT$5.06 billion.
The Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) unit also produces casings for Apple’s iPhone 5 and notebook casings for big global notebook PC vendors such as Dell Inc and Acer Inc (宏碁).
On an annual basis, last month’s figure dropped 9.23 percent.
Cumulative sales in the first five months of the year increased 1.26 percent to NT$31.9 billion from a year earlier, the company said in a stock exchange filing.
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