VIA Technologies, the world's number two chipset maker after Intel, announced yesterday its sales hit NT$31 billion (US$936 million) in 2000, an increase of 171 percent over the previous year.
The report beat market expectations and sent its stock price rocketing. VIA shares closed up 13 points at NT$205, hitting the market's 7 percent limit on the day.
"[The sales figures] are a sign of our presence in the market, the strength of our relationships and products," said Richard Brown, director of marketing at VIA.
The company's 2000 earnings report -- based on a total of monthly sales reports and not yet finalized -- surprised many due to the sharp downturn in global PC sales during the fourth quarter last year.
"[But] the big question for VIA is this year, not last year," said Paul Meyer, analyst at Credit Lyonnais Securities.
He expects the slowdown in personal computers to have a big impact on VIA's earnings, saying the company's December sales figure shows a steep drop-off at the tail end of the year.
He said the 2000 sales figure is in line with Credit Lyonnais expectations, but that this year, VIA's sales will hit NT$43 billion, only a 38 percent increase over last year. He also sees the company changing the focus of its business.
VIA is a world leader in chipset design, taking a 35 percent share of the world market last year. Intel, by contrast, took nearly 55 percent of the world market.
This year, Brown expects to increase its share in chipsets to over 40 percent of the world market.
Chipsets manage the flow of information between the central processing unit (CPU) and computer memory chips.
But Meyer believes "the story for VIA now is CPUs, not chipsets."
Although the company captured less than 1 percent of the CPU market last year, this year VIA expects to increase sales to between 5 million and 10 million units, or 5 to 10 percent of the world market.
The company sold only two million units, according to Credit Lyonnais estimates.
VIA has worked on a number of new CPU products over the past year. The company expects its Cyrix III series, which run at speeds between 500MHz to 667MHz to gain steam in the markets for low cost desktop PCs, notebooks, and information appliances.
Still, VIA's Brown said chipsets drove company growth last year, and he expects its new products to bring solid growth to the company.
VIA produced chipsets both for Intel and AMD microchips, two of the world's largest CPU makers.
"AMD is doing very will with their Athlon and Duron products," said Brown, "and we have 90 percent of the [chipset] market for those chips."
VIA has also been first to market with the next generation of chipsets for Intel and AMD products -- the DDR 266 -- (double data rate) which doubles the rate at which data travels between the computer's memory and its CPU, making the computer run much faster.
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