Taiwan’s digital camera contract maker Altek Corp (華晶科) yesterday debuted its third self-branded cellphone in a move to pursue business diversification.
The camera maker stepped into the mobile phone business early last year, introducing two models in China and Taiwan. It also makes phones for other companies on a contract basis.
“We aren’t positioning ourselves as a professional phone maker or aiming to launch a complete set of phones,” vice president J.S. Liang (梁志賢) said at the product launch.
PHOTO: WANG I-HUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
Instead, Altek hopes to target digital camera enthusiasts who view a phone as a secondary need to their daily use, Liang said.
The Altek T8680 — a 2.75G camera phone that claims to be the first in the industry to incorporate a 12 mega-pixel camera and three times zooming optical lens.
The cellphone business currently contributes less than 5 percent to Altek’s total revenues, but Liang said that proportion is set to rise heading into the next year.
The company plans to debut its first smartphone — a 3G model — in the fourth quarter.
In addition to its phone business, Altek has made a foray into the growing automobile electronics sector, supplying cameras to Yulon Group (裕隆集團) for its Luxgen minivans.
Altek’s earnings in the second quarter rose 54 percent from the first three months to NT$402 million (US$12.6 million), while gross margin slid 1.1 percentage points to 10.1 percent.
Its consolidated revenues grew 38 percent sequentially to NT$7.4 billion, bolstered by camera orders from Japanese and US clients, it said.
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