Inventec Corp (英業達) chairman Richard Lee (李詩欽) yesterday said total shipments of the company’s PC and non-PC products could grow by more than 40 percent from last year’s 70 million units to 100 million units this year, driven by the tablet and smart device segments.
“We expect to ship 5 million tablets this year, which is 500 percent more than last year’s 1 million units,” Lee told a news conference in Taipei.
Apart from producing Android tablets, Inventec also plans to manufacture tablets that run on Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system this year, Lee said.
Photo: Cho Yi-chun, Taipei Times
The company will focus on enhancing the efficiency of business tablets, as the outlook for the corporate tablet segment is still promising, he said.
Inventec also expects to ship 50 million smart devices, an increase of more than 40 percent from last year’s 30 million units, Lee said, citing the rising Internet of Things trend, where all gadgets are connected to the Web.
Overall, Inventec’s PC-related product shipments could grow more than 16.66 percent from last year’s 20 million units to between 24 million and 25 million units this year, he added.
Last quarter, the firm’s notebook computer shipments totaled 4.5 million units, which represented a decline of 29.7 percent year-on-year and 2.2 percent quarter-on-quarter.
Among PC-related products, Lee said its server segment sales rose 22 percent annually to more than NT$100 billion (US$3.14 billion) last year, adding that he expects server business to grow by double-digit percentage points this year.
However, the US’ anti-dumping rulings for Taiwanese and Chinese solar energy businesses had a negative impact on Inventec last year. Lee said the company hopes solar energy sales this year will hold steady matching last year’s NT$20 billion.
Separately, Lee said he presented Inventec’s network-attached storage (NAS) for home solution to Xiaomi Corp (小米) founder and chief executive officer Lei Jun (雷軍) this week.
Citing Lei’s remarks of seeing smart home devices as a big market trend in the next few years, Lee said that “Inventec has been working on smart home devices for a while. I think we might have an opportunity to work further with Xiaomi in the future.”
Lee said he also discussed possible cooperation with Chinese software developer Kingsoft Co (金山軟件) on its Dr Eye translation software and cloud storage solutions.
The company is also planning to build a smartphone manufacturing plant in India to meet increasing orders from Xiaomi, Lee said.
Currently, Inventec’s Nanjing plant in China manufactures 6 million smartphones per month. Lee said the company is to expand production capacity to between 8 million and 10 million units per month.
Separately, Inventec’s quarterly revenue reached NT$112.74 billion in the last quarter, down 16.25 percent from a year earlier, but an 11.25 percent increase from the previous quarter.
For the full year, the company’s consolidated revenue declined 5.51 percent to NT$435.67 billion from the previous year’s NT$461.09 billion.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”