HTC Corp (宏達電), the world’s No. 5 smartphone brand, saw last month’s revenue hit a record high for the third month in a row on strong smartphone shipments.
Revenue totaled NT$40.6 billion (US$1.4 billion) last month, up 115.8 percent year-on-year. The company reported sales of NT$38.7 billion for April and NT$37 billion in March.
Total revenue for the first five months of the year hit NT$183.5 billion, up 145 percent from the corresponding period last year, according to a company statement.
HTC forecast in late April that second-quarter revenue would expand 97 percent year-on-year to NT$120 billion. Smartphone shipments were to grow between 103 percent and 113 percent, to between 11 million to 11.5 million units.
Goldman Sachs said HTC poses a threat to industry leaders because of the Taiwanese company’s leading portfolio of products, solid smartphone strategy and rising global brand awareness.
“A faster-than-expected smartphone migration and replacement cycle could put HTC at an advantage over peers,” Goldman Sachs said in a research note on Wednesday last week.
HTC is likely to announce today the local launch date of the HTC Salsa, the latest member of the HTC family and a “Facebook” phone that allows users to text and upload videos and pictures to Facebook.
Shares in HTC closed up 3.6 percent to NT$1,285 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
AT HIGH CAPACITY: Three-month order visibility on stable customer demand would push factory utilization to between 80 and 85 percent, Vanguard’s president said Foundry service provider Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) yesterday said it is unable to fully satisfy surging demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers and data centers, amid an AI infrastructure investment boom that is crowding out production of less advanced chips. Vanguard is facing an “undersupply of chips” made using mature process technologies, due to strong demand for AI products and improving demand from customers in the commercial, industrial and auto sectors, which are digesting excess inventory to a healthier level, company chairman Fang Leuh (方略) told a virtual investors’ conference. However, Vanguard gave a more conservative view on
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