Inventec Corp (英業達) chairman Richard Lee (李詩欽) yesterday said total shipments of the company’s PC and non-PC products could grow by more than 40 percent from last year’s 70 million units to 100 million units this year, driven by the tablet and smart device segments.
“We expect to ship 5 million tablets this year, which is 500 percent more than last year’s 1 million units,” Lee told a news conference in Taipei.
Apart from producing Android tablets, Inventec also plans to manufacture tablets that run on Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system this year, Lee said.
Photo: Cho Yi-chun, Taipei Times
The company will focus on enhancing the efficiency of business tablets, as the outlook for the corporate tablet segment is still promising, he said.
Inventec also expects to ship 50 million smart devices, an increase of more than 40 percent from last year’s 30 million units, Lee said, citing the rising Internet of Things trend, where all gadgets are connected to the Web.
Overall, Inventec’s PC-related product shipments could grow more than 16.66 percent from last year’s 20 million units to between 24 million and 25 million units this year, he added.
Last quarter, the firm’s notebook computer shipments totaled 4.5 million units, which represented a decline of 29.7 percent year-on-year and 2.2 percent quarter-on-quarter.
Among PC-related products, Lee said its server segment sales rose 22 percent annually to more than NT$100 billion (US$3.14 billion) last year, adding that he expects server business to grow by double-digit percentage points this year.
However, the US’ anti-dumping rulings for Taiwanese and Chinese solar energy businesses had a negative impact on Inventec last year. Lee said the company hopes solar energy sales this year will hold steady matching last year’s NT$20 billion.
Separately, Lee said he presented Inventec’s network-attached storage (NAS) for home solution to Xiaomi Corp (小米) founder and chief executive officer Lei Jun (雷軍) this week.
Citing Lei’s remarks of seeing smart home devices as a big market trend in the next few years, Lee said that “Inventec has been working on smart home devices for a while. I think we might have an opportunity to work further with Xiaomi in the future.”
Lee said he also discussed possible cooperation with Chinese software developer Kingsoft Co (金山軟件) on its Dr Eye translation software and cloud storage solutions.
The company is also planning to build a smartphone manufacturing plant in India to meet increasing orders from Xiaomi, Lee said.
Currently, Inventec’s Nanjing plant in China manufactures 6 million smartphones per month. Lee said the company is to expand production capacity to between 8 million and 10 million units per month.
Separately, Inventec’s quarterly revenue reached NT$112.74 billion in the last quarter, down 16.25 percent from a year earlier, but an 11.25 percent increase from the previous quarter.
For the full year, the company’s consolidated revenue declined 5.51 percent to NT$435.67 billion from the previous year’s NT$461.09 billion.
FALLING BEHIND: Samsung shares have declined more than 20 percent this year, as the world’s largest chipmaker struggles in key markets and plays catch-up to rival SK Hynix Samsung Electronics Co is laying off workers in Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand as part of a plan to reduce its global headcount by thousands of jobs, sources familiar with the situation said. The layoffs could affect about 10 percent of its workforces in those markets, although the numbers for each subsidiary might vary, said one of the sources, who asked not to be named because the matter is private. Job cuts are planned for other overseas subsidiaries and could reach 10 percent in certain markets, the source said. The South Korean company has about 147,000 in staff overseas, more than half
TECH PARTNERSHIP: The deal with Arizona-based Amkor would provide TSMC with advanced packing and test capacities, a requirement to serve US customers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is collaborating with Amkor Technology Inc to provide local advanced packaging and test capacities in Arizona to address customer requirements for geographical flexibility in chip manufacturing. As part of the agreement, TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, would contract turnkey advanced packaging and test services from Amkor at their planned facility in Peoria, Arizona, a joint statement released yesterday said. TSMC would leverage these services to support its customers, particularly those using TSMC’s advanced wafer fabrication facilities in Phoenix, Arizona, it said. The companies would jointly define the specific packaging technologies, such as TSMC’s Integrated
An Indian factory producing iPhone components resumed work yesterday after a fire that halted production — the third blaze to disrupt Apple Inc’s local supply chain since the start of last year. Local industrial behemoth Tata Group’s plant in Tamil Nadu, which was shut down by the unexplained fire on Saturday, is a key linchpin of Apple’s nascent supply chain in the country. A spokesperson for subsidiary Tata Electronics Pvt yesterday said that the company would restart work in “many areas of the facility today.” “We’ve been working diligently since Saturday to support our team and to identify the cause of the fire,”
China’s economic planning agency yesterday outlined details of measures aimed at boosting the economy, but refrained from major spending initiatives. The piecemeal nature of the plans announced yesterday appeared to disappoint investors who were hoping for bolder moves, and the Shanghai Composite Index gave up a 10 percent initial gain as markets reopened after a weeklong holiday to end 4.59 percent higher, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index dived 9.41 percent. Chinese National Development and Reform Commission Chairman Zheng Shanjie (鄭珊潔) said the government would frontload 100 billion yuan (US$14.2 billion) in spending from the government’s budget for next year in addition
RSS