Contract laptop maker Inventec Corp (英業達) is working to begin production in Indonesia and India for its major Chinese mobile phone customer, Xiaomi Inc (小米).
Inventec chairman Richard Lee (李詩欽) yesterday said his company is one of the overseas manufacturing partners of Xiaomi, which contracted with New Taipei City-based Foxconn Technology Group (鴻海) earlier this year to produce phones in India and Brazil.
“It is only a matter of time” before Inventec gets production going in Indonesia and it is making “smooth progress” at its new factory in India, which has started shipping notebooks and tablets, Lee told reporters on the sidelines of the 20th World Electronics Forum and the 11th Asia Electronics Forum in Taipei.
However, he declined to say whether Xiaomi’s first laptop, which is due to be released in the first half of next year, will be manufactured at Inventec’s Indian factory.
Taiwanese media reported last month that the Xiaomi notebook, about 15 inches in size and running a Linux operating system, would be released next year at a starting price of 2,999 yuan (US$471).
Lee also said that he is confident that shipments of Xiaomi smartphones will continue to grow, outperforming the overall market next year, thanks to a new lineup of low-cost feature-rich phones, although the five-year-old Chinese brand is expected to grow at a slower pace than in the past two years given the saturation in the global smartphone market.
Inventec’s handset subsidiary, Inventec Appliance Corp (英華達), assembled about 30 million smartphones for Xiaomi last year, splitting orders with Foxconn.
The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday last week cited Xiaomi chief executive Lei Jun (雷軍) as saying that his company was on track to sell 80 million phones this year, up 31 percent from 61.1 million units last year.
However, Lei declined to give a forecast for next year, saying only that Xiaomi’s biggest challenge came from managing internal and external expectations, the newspaper said.
Xiaomi would focus on three key markets outside China — India, Indonesia and Brazil — and it was aiming to become the top smartphone brand in India in the next three years, the Journal cited Lei as saying.
Separately, Lee said Inventec’s revenue is likely to exceed US$20 billion by 2017.
The company’s consolidated revenue was NT$435.5 billion (US$13.2 billion at current exchange rates) last year and a similar level is expected for this year.
Inventec’s annual revenue is estimated to exceed US$20 billion by 2017, when the company plans to book some potential income that is not currently reflected in its financial statements due to the confidential nature of some of its customer interactions, Lee said.
Shipments of Inventec products, including laptops, servers, tablets, smartphones and handheld devices, are expected to grow to an estimated 90 million units this year, to 100 million units next year and reach 130 million to 140 million units by 2017, Lee said.
It would “not be too difficult to achieve,” he said.
Inventec is expected to benefit from the launch of new products by its customers next year and its own ongoing “smart manufacturing” campaign to replace part of its workforce in its Chinese factories with robots, he said.
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