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
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