Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦), the world’s second-largest contract laptop maker, plans to lay off more than 100 employees, accounting for 2 percent of its employees in Taiwan.
The Taipei-based company said in an e-mailed statement yesterday that the move was in response to a worse-than-expected performance in its tablet PC business, and aimed to ensure that the company’s resources are used efficiently.
Compal makes Android tablets for its clients such as Acer Inc (宏碁) and Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想).
The company did not provide contingency measures with regard to the matter in the statement, nor when the layoffs would be implemented. The company only said that the layoffs would not affect its operations significantly.
As of yesterday, Compal had 5,000 employees in Taiwan.
Over the past year, the global PC industry has seen Apple Inc’s iPad tablets growing in popularity and the proliferation of non-Apple tablets eating into traditional PC maker’s profit margins, resulting in many of them — PC brands and contract manufacturers alike, to expand into the tablet market.
However, not everyone has been able to share in the fruits of the expanding tablet business. Taiwanese contract notebook makers such as Inventec Corp (英業達) and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) have laid off hundreds of workers for reasons related to their underperformance in the tablet sector.
On Oct. 9, Compal reported consolidated revenue of NT$64.52 billion (US$2.19 billion) for last month, up 24.7 percent month-on-month and 12.9 percent year-on-year, although its accumulated revenue totaled NT$498.47 billion in the first nine months of the year, down 4.2 percent from a year earlier.
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