Contract electronics maker Inventec Corp (英業達) is laying off employees at its all-in-one (AIO) computer subsidiary TPV-Inventa Technology Co Ltd (英冠達) and plans to close the subsidiary next year at the earliest, following a drastic decline in orders, a company executive confirmed yesterday.
“We are downsizing at TPV-Inventa and moving all of its operations to Inventec,” Inventec spokesman Yu Chin-pao (游進寶) said by telephone.
Yu’s remarks came after the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported that Inventec is laying off 39 of its 59 remaining staff at TPV-Inventa before the end of this year, leaving only 20 employees at the unit’s financial department to settle the company’s accounts.
The report quoted a former employee, who was recently dismissed by the company, as saying that TPV-Inventa had more than 300 employees at the beginning of last year, but Inventec reallocated 60 of the firm’s headcount to other business units and began laying off workers in the second half of last year.
Inventec dismissed one or two employees at a time and waited for weeks to continue scaling down its head count in an attempt to avoid having to report to labor authorities about a mass layoff, the report said.
Yu declined to disclose the actual number of employees who had left the company, but confirmed that the layoffs were staggered over the past year.
The company plans to dissolve and liquidate TPV-Inventa after resources and employee reallocation is completed, Yu said.
Established in 2000 with a paid-in capital of NT$1.25 billion (US$39.23 million), TPV-Inventa was a joint venture of Inventec and TPV Technology Group (冠捷科技).
Its clients include Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), HP Inc and Dell Inc.
The decision came as a surprise, because it followed a cash injection of US$22 million by Inventec in September last year to increase its shareholding in the AIO subsidiary, while TPV left the joint venture’s board.
TPV-Inventa’s AIO business contributed about 2 percent, or NT$2.23 billion, to Inventec’s consolidated revenue of NT$111.63 billion last quarter, according to company statistics.
However, with its business continuing to fall, “TPV-Inventa is not likely to turn profitable this year,” Yu said, declining to disclose the amount of losses at the subsidiary.
Industry sources told the Taipei Times that TPV-Inventa lost a significant number of AIO PC orders from Lenovo this year, after the Chinese company reallocated orders for 1.2 million units to Asia Vital Components Co Ltd (奇鋐) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶).
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