Acer Inc (宏碁) is confident that its sales volume at the IT Month trade show will grow 40 percent year-on-year this week, as the event’s organizers expect more than 900,000 visitors to attend this year.
The annual information technology trade show, which opened in Taipei on Saturday, features a wide range of new electronic gadgets, wearable devices, 3D printers, “smart” home appliances, cloud-technology applications and technology related to the Internet of Things from 350 exhibitors.
Among these will be Acer’s 13.3-inch Aspire R13 convertible notebook, which can switch between laptop and tablet configurations. The product features two separate hinge mechanisms that work together to allow transitions between six different user modes.
Photo: CNA
The computer maker also displayed its new 7-inch “phablet,” the Iconia Talk S, at the show in the Taipei World Trade Center. The device comes with Acer’s Build Your Own Cloud application, allowing users to sync and access data across their smart devices wirelessly.
“We are expecting a sales volume increase of 40 percent this year from last year,” Acer Taiwan Regional Operation president Towny Huang (黃鐘鋒) said at a product launch ceremony on Saturday, but did not give exact sales figures.
Acer is offering substantial discounts at IT Month to boost its sales, as the company marked down its 13.3-inch Aspire V3-371 notebook computer by NT$6,000 (US$193) to NT$21,900 and cut the price of its 15.6-inch Aspire V Nitro notebook computer by nearly NT$7,000 to less than NT$30,000.
Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), the world’s biggest computer maker, also used discounts to attract visitors’ attention.
The Chinese company provided a 50 percent discount on eight of its Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 computers for early-bird visitors to IT Month.
In addition to electronic gadgets and communication devices, Honda Taiwan Co (台灣本田) — which is taking part in the annual IT event for the first time — showing off its efforts to develop interface technology for be used in automotive dashboards which is able to link vehicles and drivers’ smartphones.
IT Month is set to run through Sunday and is scheduled to move to Greater Taichung on Friday next week, to Greater Kaohsiung on Dec. 25 and Greater Tainan on Jan. 1.
Separately, Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co (元大投顧) predicted global PC shipments could decline by up to 5 percent this quarter from last quarter — dragged down by Acer’s weakening growth in shipments.
“Acer shipped too many products to distributors in Europe in the last quarter, but the demand for notebooks in Europe slowed at the end of last quarter,” a Yuanta analyst who declined to be named told the Taipei Times by telephone.
The analyst said that as Europe’s demand remains relatively soft, Acer would not ship products unless distributors unload growing inventories and that this would sequentially affect the company’s performance this quarter.
According to the latest data released by International Data Corp (IDC) last week, Acer’s PC shipments totaled 6.63 million last quarter, up 11.4 percent from a year earlier.
Global PC shipments totaled 78.5 million units last quarter, down 0.5 percent year-on-year, according to IDC.
The Yuanta analyst said that the global PC industry is expected to see flat growth next year as there is “no specific growth driver or exciting catalyst.”
The analyst added that although the tablet market continues to grow, its erosion of the PC industry seems to be bottoming out already, so a decline in tablet sales would only bring limited benefits to the PC market.
Additional reporting by CNA
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to