Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) is narrowing its focus to the traditional notebook market, despite the recent successes of Acer Inc(宏碁)and AsusTek Computer Inc(華碩電腦)with netbooks, a company official said.
“The competition in the netbook sphere is extremely intense. There’s very little margin in that category, and we at HP believe the recent netbook frenzy is due to the back-to-school season, when kids are buying laptops for school,” Clair Chang (張淑雯), manager of HP Taiwan’s product marketing department, said at a media briefing.
“As the market normalizes, we see more and more consumers going back to quality traditional notebooks. And traditional notebooks will be our company focus going forward,” Chang said yesterday as the company introduced a suite of Elitebook-brand models targeted at business users.
Asked about what effect the concentrated strategic move would have on its global sales target this year, Chang said HP’s corporate sales target has not been revised downward, despite the global economic slowdown.
Moreover, she said, HP will continue to be the world’s No. 1 computer vendor this year.
HP plans to release its second generation of Mini-Note models before the end of the year. The company declined to say how many models it expects to ship or what the specifications of the new generation would be.
HP’s new Elitebook series was inspired by aircraft engineering and features a magnesium alloy chassis designed to operate in a variety of working conditions, said Monty Wong (王漢彪), vice president and manager of HP’s personal computing systems group.
Elitebook prices range from NT$65,900 to NT$99,900.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
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