Asustek Computer Inc (華碩電腦), the world’s fifth-largest PC brand, yesterday said it expected shipments of its tablet PCs to double next year on robust sales of the popular Eee Pad Transformer series.
The company plans to sell as many as 4 million tablets next year, up from its forecast shipments of 1.8 million this year, according to a company executive who asked to remain anonymous.
Asustek Computer chief executive Jerry Shen (沈振來) yesterday said he was upbeat about sales of Asustek tablets at a press conference to unveil the company -second model, the Transformer Prime, which it says has better features than Samsung Electronics Co’s Galaxy Tab and Apple Inc’s iPad 2.
Photo: Chen Ping-hung, Taipei Times
Asustek adjusted downward its full-year target of shipping 2 million tablets to 1.8 million in late October, after Amazon announced plans to release Kindle Fire this quarter with a price tag of US$199 — less than half that of an iPad.
Asustek said in October that it shipped 400,000 tablets in the second quarter — when the Eee Pad Transformer debuted, and shipments doubled to 800,000 in the third quarter.
The company estimated that it would ship 600,000 tablets in the fourth quarter, bringing total shipments for the year to 1.8 million.
The company is set to focus on one model — the Transformer series — for future tablet designs and phase out other models such as the E-Slider and the E-Slate, Shen said.
The Transformer series has been well received by consumers as it comes with a detachable keyboard that converts the tablet into a 10.1-inch notebook. The keyboard also doubles as an extra battery source.
Asustek will compete with Samsung for third or fourth place among PC brands next year, Shen said, while Apple and Amazon would remain the top two vendors.
The thinner and lighter Transformer Prime is the industry’s first tablet powered by a quad-core processor from Nvidia Corp that enables it to play full HD 1080p movies.
The 10.1 inch model, which is upgradeable to the latest Android 4.0 operating system — dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich — will go on sale at the IT Month consumer electronics fair, which starts tomorrow in Taipei, at a price of NT$18,000 (US$599), or NT$21,000 with the detachable keyboard.
Asustek has also cut the price of its first Transformer model to between NT$13,500 and NT$16,500 to make it more competitive.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
UNIFYING OPPOSITION: Numerous companies have registered complaints over the potential levies, bringing together rival automakers in voicing their reservations US President Donald Trump is readying plans for industry-specific tariffs to kick in alongside his country-by-country duties in two weeks, ramping up his push to reshape the US’ standing in the global trading system by penalizing purchases from abroad. Administration officials could release details of Trump’s planned 50 percent duty on copper in the days before they are set to take effect on Friday next week, a person familiar with the matter said. That is the same date Trump’s “reciprocal” levies on products from more than 100 nations are slated to begin. Trump on Tuesday said that he is likely to impose tariffs
HELPING HAND: Approving the sale of H20s could give China the edge it needs to capture market share and become the global standard, a US representative said The US President Donald Trump administration’s decision allowing Nvidia Corp to resume shipments of its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China risks bolstering Beijing’s military capabilities and expanding its capacity to compete with the US, the head of the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party said. “The H20, which is a cost-effective and powerful AI inference chip, far surpasses China’s indigenous capability and would therefore provide a substantial increase to China’s AI development,” committee chairman John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said on Friday in a letter to US Secretary of
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) market value closed above US$1 trillion for the first time in Taipei last week, with a raised sales forecast driven by robust artificial intelligence (AI) demand. TSMC saw its Taiwanese shares climb to a record high on Friday, a near 50 percent rise from an April low. That has made it the first Asian stock worth more than US$1 trillion, since PetroChina Co (中國石油天然氣) briefly reached the milestone in 2007. As investors turned calm after their aggressive buying on Friday, amid optimism over the chipmaker’s business outlook, TSMC lost 0.43 percent to close at NT$1,150
RSS