Chipset makers' June sales fall to 16-month low

VIA Technologies Inc (威盛電子) and Silicon Integrated Systems Co (矽統科技), the nation's biggest chipset makers, said sales fell last month, hurt by fewer orders from makers of circuit boards used in personal computers.

VIA's June sales fell 0.1 percent to NT$2.02 billion (US$58.7 million) from the year-ago period, spokesman Charlton Chen said.

They fell a quarter compared with May and were the lowest in 16 months. Sales at Silicon Integrated, VIA's biggest rival in Taiwan, fell 19 percent on year to NT$606 million, a 25 percent drop from the previous month.

Revenue for Taiwan's chipset companies may improve slightly in the quarter beginning this month as demand rises ahead of the back-to-school season in September. The rise in shipments will initially be limited because PC motherboard makers are unlikely to place fresh orders until they have consumed their inventories, analysts said.

VIA's first-half revenue rose 44 percent on year to NT$18.3 billion, or 41 percent of sales forecast for the year. The company won't know until September whether PC orders will increase at the start of the new school year, Richard Brown, VIA's director of international marketing, said last month.

Taiwan's computer-related companies cut profit estimates and fired workers in the last quarter as orders for semiconductors fell, underscoring the lack of demand for computers worldwide.

On Friday, Mitac International Corp (神達電腦), which makes computers for Compaq Computer Corp, said it would fire a tenth of its staff and report that first-half profit fell more than a third on year as its slashed prices to boost sales.

Shipments of chipsets may rise in the third quarter as motherboard makers introduce circuit boards that use chipsets compatible with cheaper memory chips running on Intel Corp's Pentium 4 processor. Chipsets manage the flow of data between a processor and other parts of a computer.