Shares of Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦) rose yesterday in the wake of news reports that it is manufacturing iPhones for Apple, with shipments starting in September.
The world's biggest contract maker of notebook computers, Quanta counts Dell Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co among its major clients.
Its share price inched up 0.4 percent to close at NT$50.8 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
Two local business dailies, the Commercial Times and the Economic Daily News, yesterday reported that Quanta will make its first delivery in September, sharing the order with the first appointed iPhone assembler, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (
The reports added that Quanta's shipments of iPhones would soar to 5 million next year.
However, Vincent Chen (陳豊丰), a research analyst with the investment banking house CLSA Ltd., dismissed the reports.
"We have checked with our industry contact and confirmed that Hon Hai is still doing the iPhone order," Chen wrote in a research note yesterday.
What Quanta is working on is the next iPod model with wireless local area network (WLAN), not the iPhone, he said.
"An order of 5 million units is too big to be true [considering] the challenge Hon Hai is currently facing in raising production yields [for the iPhone]," he wrote.
In a filing to the stock exchange, Quanta refused to comment, citing client confidentiality, but said it was aggressively pursuing new orders to boost the company's sales growth.
Some industry watchers are skeptical about the hype surrounding the iPhone, which is scheduled to debut in the US late next month.
"Apple is targeting to sell 10 million iPhones next year. The figure is only 1 percent of the world's total handset sales," Shiv Bakhshi, an International Data Corp analyst, said at a forum yesterday.
The iPhone may revolutionize the user interface, look and feel of the tele phone, but it might not live up to expectations of being a "market killer," he added.
Quanta has been expanding its production capacity to boost mobile phone and video-music player manufacturing on a contract basis.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary