BenQ Corp (
"We hope to double our annual shipment to over 200,000 notebooks this year, a target that took the nation's leading player Asustek Computer Inc (
PHOTO: WANG YI-HUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
Rankings
Asustek ranked as the largest laptop vendor in Taiwan in terms of shipment in the fourth quarter last year, with a 29.4 percent market share, followed by Acer with 23.8 percent, Hewlett-Packard at 14.1 percent, IBM with 12 percent and Toshiba's 3.8 percent, according to International Data Corp.
Target Markets
Horng said BenQ would target European countries, including developed Western countries and the emerging Eastern Europe, as well as China, as its two major markets. The company hopes to ship over 70 percent of its total shipment to these markets this year.
BenQ, which is also the nation's largest handset maker, shipped 101,391 laptops worldwide last year, selling more than 20,000 in Europe and more than 40,000 units in China, according to the company's figures.
In a bid to foster its two-year-old notebook business and enhance its product lineup, BenQ separated the unit out and made it an independent department and last year hired Horng, former executive of the personal systems group with IBM Taiwan, to take take charge of it.
The ambitious official hopes the unit will contribute NT$10 billion of an expected NT$164 billion in sales for the consumer electronics maker, a Chinese-language press cited Horng as saying earlier this month.
Despite the company's optimism regarding shipment growth, BenQ is not so bullish about the home market this year.
"[Taiwan's] notebook market is expected to grow marginally to around 600,000 units this year from between 540,000 units and 550,000 units last year ? due to weaker demand and a lack of appealing technology upgrades," BenQ's senior marketing manager Joseph Liu (
BenQ's sales target in Taiwan this year will stay at a similar level to last year, at around 28,000 units, according to the company.
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