Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) yesterday reported slight annual growth in net income for last quarter, supported primarily by better-than-expected notebook shipments during the electronics industry’s peak season.
Net profit inched up 0.88 percent to NT$4.54 billion (US$135.84 million) last quarter, the company said. That represented a quarterly growth of 7.83 percent.
“Last quarter’s net income growth was mainly because of the better-than-expected notebook PC shipments,” chief financial officer Nick Wu (吳長榮) told the Taipei Times.
The PC vendor shipped 5.4 million notebooks during the October-to-December quarter, beating its estimate of 5.2 million units, Asustek said.
The quarterly results brought the company’s net profit for the full year to NT$17.09 billion, down 12.22 percent from NT$19.47 billion in 2014, the company’s filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange showed.
Asustek attributed the decline to currency exchange losses and lower investment income compared with the previous year.
Brand revenues last year were flattish at NT$436.52 billion compared with NT$436.26 billion in 2014, it said.
Asustek also reported that annual revenue rose 0.9 percent to NT$35.29 billion last month. That represented a sequential decline of 7.08 percent.
The company is to host an investors’ conference tomorrow to provide its quarterly guidance for this quarter.
In related news, Taiwanese contract computer makers Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達), Wistron Corp (緯創), Compal Electronics Co (仁寶) and Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday all reported double-digit percentage declines in revenue last month due to PC industry headwinds and a seasonal slowdown.
Quanta’s revenue plunged 14.34 percent annually and 38.03 percent monthly to NT$60.07 billion last month, its filing showed.
“Due to early pull-in shipment requests in December and seasonality, Quanta’s notebook shipments plummeted more than 40 percent to 2.3 million units last month from the 4 million notebooks it shipped in a month ago,” an investor relations officer said by telephone.
Wistron’s revenue fell 16.45 percent year-on-year and 29.33 percent month-on-month to NT$41.21 billion last month, while Compal’s dropped 18.41 percent annually and 32.57 percent monthly to NT$56.08 billion last month, citing slow season and clouded visibility of the PC industry.
Pegatron attributed its 14.08 percent annual decline in revenue to NT$101.43 billion last month to a higher base compared with the same period last year.
The slow season also weighed on Pegatron’s sales last month, the company said.
Inventec’s sales shrank 21.9 percent to NT$30.1 billion last month from a month earlier, but the firm’s monthly sales grew 0.78 percent from a year earlier.
“The slight annual increase in revenue was fueled by the robust demand from handheld devices and solar products, while PC shipments last month contracted from a month earlier due to seasonality,” its investor relations officer said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS