With market demand has stabilizing and major brand vendors enter a new product cycle, total shipments of notebook computers from Taiwan’s five major contract producers are likely to continue increasing this quarter from last quarter, with performance in the second half set to be stronger than the first, a SinoPac Securities Investment Service Co (永豐金投顧) report said.
However, the sequential increase in total shipments would slow to between 2 and 3 percent this quarter, following 9 percent growth last quarter due to a higher comparison base, SinoPac researcher Eric Hung (洪國軒) said in the report issued on Friday.
SinoPac’s forecast came after the nation’s major contract notebook computer makers last week released their quarterly results.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), the world’s largest contract notebook computer maker, shipped 11.5 million units in the April-to-June period, an increase of 9.5 percent from the 10.5 million units seen over the previous three months, and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶), the world’s second-largest contract laptop maker, reported shipments of 10.6 million units, up 17.8 percent quarter-on-quarter. Wistron Corp (緯創) saw shipments increase 11 percent to 5 million units, Inventec Corp’s (英業達) shipments were flat at 4.7 million units, and Pegatron Corp (和碩) reported a 5 percent decline to 2.5 million units.
“Based on clients’ guidance and our current sale performance, we forecast our shipments this quarter to grow at a mid-single digit rate from last quarter,” a Quanta official said on Friday.
“Continued PC sales for the workplace and back-to-school demand are the main market drivers,” said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Compal is also upbeat about its business outlook in the second half of the year, forecasting shipments for the current quarter would increase at a single-digit rate sequentially and growth to be sustained next quarter on the back of replacement demand for commercial notebooks.
“Demand for commercial notebooks has actually been growing since the third quarter of last year,” Compal’s investor relations official Tina Chang (張妍婷) said on Friday. “Demand for commercial laptops has been stronger than for consumer models in the past few months.”
Major market research institutes said the Windows XP support expiry should continue to offer tailwinds to the notebook PC industry over the next several quarters and help stabilize the corporate PC sector.
Last quarter, global PC shipments from brand-name companies led by China’s Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) grew 0.1 percent from the same period a year earlier, after eight quarters of decline, Gartner Inc said earlier last week, while data compiled by the International Data Corp showed total shipments dropped 1.7 percent year-on-year.
“We remain ‘overweight’ on market share gainers in the PC industry, with Lenovo’s strong second-quarter performance echoing our view for ongoing PC consolidation, which is also reflected by Quanta and Compal’s better-than-peer second-quarter shipment growth,” JPMorgan Securities Ltd said in a client note on Thursday.
“However, we would remain conservative on Acer (宏碁) and Asustek (華碩) as it seems challenging for them to gain back significant shares from the tier 1 vendors that appear to be consolidating the PC market,” the brokerage said.
Based on figures in a report released on Friday by Taipei-based Digitimes Research, Hewlett-Packard Co regained its position as the world’s top notebook PC brand in the second quarter with a 19.5 percent global market share, beating Lenovo (聯想) with a share of 17.7 percent during the April-June period.
US-based Dell Inc remained in third place with a 12.2 percent global market share, while Acer (宏碁) took fourth place with 10.8 percent, followed by Asustek(華碩) with 10.5 percent.
Additional reporting by Helen Ku
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained