Mon, Apr 27, 2009 page12

• Notebook shipments may decline

  FLAT PERFORMANCE Merrill Lynch said tight component supplies and inventory adjustments might contribute to a 6 percent drop in shipments from last month

  • By Elizabeth Tchii / STAFF REPORTER
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  Local notebook contract makers Wistron Corp (緯創) and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) may see this month’s notebook shipments drop 6 percent from last month, Merrill Lynch said in a research note.

  Last month, Wistron and Quanta reported shipments of 2.2 million and 2.7 million units respectively.

  Merrill Lynch attributed the declines to “a delayed launch of Acer’s (宏碁) notebooks running on Intel Corp’s consumer ultra low voltage (CULV) platform in May, tight component supply and even possible inventory adjustments,” the weekend note said.

  On Saturday, Quanta chairman Barry Lam (林百里) said at the company’s 21st anniversary ceremony that the company “fared well in the first quarter,” while vice chairman CC Leung (梁次震) said on the sidelines of the ceremony that he saw order visibility “at around three months,” the local cable station USTV quoted the two as saying.

  Lam and Leung offered no details about the company’s performance, as Quanta is scheduled to hold an investors’ conference on Wednesday.

  Quanta shipped 6.9 million notebooks in the first three months of the year, down 13.8 percent from a year earlier, Topology Research Institute (拓墣產業) said.

  Over the same period, Wistron shipped 5.3 million laptops and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) shipped 6.35 million units, the Taipei-based researcher’s data showed.

  Merrill Lynch expects flattish laptop shipment growth next month and a meager 3 percent in June, with each month doing slightly better than the previous one in what is known as a “back-end load” scenario throughout the second quarter. Overall, contract makers are likely to see 14 percent sequential shipment growth in the current quarter, Merrill Lynch said.

  But given the recent stock rally in the PC sector, investors should be cautious on future share growth momentum for PC contract manufacturers, it said.

  Shares of the top five local PC contract makers — Compal, Wistron, Quanta, Inventec Co (英業達) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海) — have climbed 63 percent on average in the first three months of the year and 53 percent on average year-to-date, compared with a plunge of 45 percent last year.

  That was compared with increases of 44 percent on the tech sub-index in the first quarter and 36 percent year-to-date, as well as rises of 38 percent on the benchmark TAIEX in the first three months and 28 percent so far this year, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.

  Meanwhile, Merrill Lynch said notebook PC supply chain problems are contained and have not yet spread to domestic component suppliers such as notebook hinge maker Shin Zu Shing Co (新日興), keyboard maker Chicony Electronics Co (群光), chassis maker Catcher Technology (可成) and laptop battery producer Simplo Technology Co (新普).

  But Tony Tseng (曾省吾), a Merrill Lynch analyst based in Taipei, wrote in the note that these component providers would see flat performance in sales in the near term amid a lack of order visibility into June.
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