Laptop computer maker Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) expects its notebook shipments to grow in the first quarter next year thanks to recovering demand, a company executive said yesterday.
“Our notebook segment is booming now. Shipments have been growing since the beginning of September,” Asustek chief executive Jerry Shen (沈振來) told reporters on the sidelines of a launch event for the ZenFone Zoom handset in Taipei.
“Growth momentum is expected to extend into the first quarter of next year,” Shen said, without elaborating on the number of shipments.
Photo: CNA
On Nov. 11, Shen told investors that the company foresees shipments of PC products, including notebooks, increasing by almost 10 percent quarter-on-quarter to 5.8 million units in the fourth quarter.
Asustek has been carefully managing its inventory levels in its sales channels in the third quarter of this year amid industry headwinds, sources familiar with the matter said.
Recovering end-user demand and demand created by inventory buildup has helped boost the company’s notebook shipments since the end of last quarter.
Shen said he is also upbeat about the performance of Asustek’s mobile segment this quarter, which contributed 22 percent of the firm’s revenue of NT$110.98 billion (US$3.38 billion) last quarter.
“The smartphone segment has robust growth momentum. The sell-through of handsets in Asustek’s key smartphone markets is growing every day,” Shen said.
The company expects smartphone shipments to increase by nearly 30 percent to 7 million units this quarter from the 5.5 million handsets sold last quarter, Shen said.
Meanwhile, the company named two new chief operating officers as part of its efforts to improve its management structure.
Asustek chairman Jonney Shih (施崇棠) said it was a necessary move for the firm to appoint two chief operating officers to oversee Asustek’s mobile computing and PC segments separately amid increasing international competition and to reinforce its brand name.
Asustek vice presidents Samsun Hu (胡書賓) and S.Y. Hsu (許先越) were appointed as chief operating officers and both will report to Shen, according to a company filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Hu, who is also the head of Asustek’s mobile communications unit, would help the company to improve its services and product quality, Shih said.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
RSS