Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶), the world’s second-largest contract PC maker, said yesterday it expects to see notebook shipments increase between 15 percent and 20 percent in the second quarter from last quarter’s 6.3 million units as the economy improves and contract order visibility increases to one-and-a-half months.
“For the month of May, we can see 80 to 90 percent visibility and for June somewhere around 60 to 70 percent visibility,” Ray Chen (陳瑞聰), Compal president told an investor conference yesterday.
The Neihu-based company yesterday booked 10.5 percent quarter-on-quarter growth for first quarter shipments or 3.2 percent growth year-on-year.
For the full year this year, Compal predicts a total of 32 million to 35 million units in notebook shipments, Chen said.
LCD GROUP
For its liquid-crystal-display (LCD) group, Chen yesterday forecast quarterly growth of between 10 percent and 15 percent for the second quarter, over the first quarter’s 67,000 units.
CULV NOTEBOOKS
As panel prices increase steadily over time, Compal expects its gross margin percentage to decline, but the value of the gross margin would remain unaffected, Chen said.
Chen said it is hard to see the impact now of the recent introduction of consumer ultra-low-voltage (CULV) notebooks by various companies, but perhaps by the fourth quarter, CULV notebooks could comprise 20 percent of the company’s global notebook shipments.
Chen also expected low-priced, Internet-enabled netbooks to take up between 25 percent and 30 percent of overall notebook volume, but he said he did not see Android-based notebooks becoming mainstream until the second half of next year at the earliest.
As netbook screen sizes increase this year to 11.6 inches, and are embedded with Menlo computer processing units, Chen said he believed this trend would affect approximately one-fourth of regular notebook sales at most, as regular laptop prices are dropping precipitously.
AVAILABILITY
Although the availability of various components was good, the executive said there could possibly be an LCD TV shortage, particularly for 32-inch and 37-inch screens.
“As LCD panel prices are starting to rise, notebook panels [availability] could tighten as demand picks up throughout the year and consumer demand increases sharply,” he said.
Last month, Compal posted a 13 percent year-on-year decline in first-quarter net profits at NT$2.80 billion (US$84.5 million), or NT$0.73 earnings per share.
Edward Yen (顏子傑), who rates the stock “buy” at UBS AG in Taipei, gives the company a price objective of NT$31.
Compal traded down NT$0.55 to NT$31.30 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday. The benchmark TAIEX inched up 0.09 percent.
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