Touch panel supplier Wintek Corp (勝華), which counts Apple Inc, Google Inc and Amazon.com among its customers, yesterday said consolidated revenue for last month rose 1.99 percent from July, but declined 43.24 percent from a year earlier.
While the company has emerged from a trough in the April-to-June quarter and recent signs indicate that demand for tablets and white-label phone screens could lift its revenue this quarter, Wintek’s loss of orders for Apple’s new iPhone products might impact its business into next year, analysts say.
In a statement posted on the company’s Web site, Wintek said last month’s revenue rose for the second straight month to NT$5.7 billion (US$190.5 million), compared with NT$5.59 billion in July and NT$10.04 billion in August last year.
The Greater Taichung-based company did not elaborate on its latest sales results.
Last month, Wintek forecast revenue increases of as much as 10 percent this quarter from NT$174.07 billion last quarter, as clients are set to launch new products.
Credit Suisse analyst Jerry Su (蘇厚合) said ahead of the company’s release of last month’s results that Wintek would see third-quarter revenue expand 16 percent from the previous quarter, thanks to tablet screen orders for Google’s Nexus and Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
However, Deutsche Bank analyst Jessica Chang (張幸宜) said the lack of economies of scale put Wintek’s margin outlook at risk because the company’s iPhone 4 and iPad 4 business continues to shrink as it is excluded from the production chain of the upcoming iPhone 5.
“As Apple accounted for 35 percent to 40 percent of Wintek’s sales in the first half of the year, declining Apple orders will impact Wintek’s business into the next four quarters,” Chang said in a note last week.
Moreover, analysts say Wintek could lose its competitiveness if the migration of touch-screen technology occurs faster than expected and if the company fails to come up with low-cost products for China.
In the first eight months of the year, Wintek’s accumulated revenue was NT$47.37 billion, down 31.94 percent from NT$69.91 billion in the same period last year.
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