Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s third-largest computer maker, doesn’t expect to maintain this year’s rate of sales growth in Germany next year, said Wilfried Thom, head of Acer’s consumer business in the country.
“We are having a really unbelievable year,” and sales are going up, Thom said on Friday in an interview at the IFA consumer electronics conference in Berlin. “We don’t think we’ll have this kind of growth again next year, because both this year and last year we had strong growth.”
The company predicts sales will “consolidate” next year, he said. “That means that if you’re coming from 17 percent or 18 percent market share to 30 percent, it won’t continue to grow at the same pace.”
This week, the Taipei-based computer maker’s shares rose to a 3.5-year high in Taipei trading after it forecast laptop shipments may increase as much as 40 percent in the third quarter from the previous three months.
“At the moment the situation” for Acer in Germany “is much better than everybody expected six months ago,” Thom said. “The question is what happens in the third or fourth quarter, when unemployment is expected to rise.”
Currently, Acer has 19 percent of the overall notebook and netbook market in Germany, Thom said.
For consumer products overall, it has about one-third of the market, he said.
Acer’s business with companies has been much weaker than that with consumers. Recently, the number of government contracts for which Acer can bid has been growing, Thom said.
“There are a lot of offers we have to send out and that looks really good, but the private sector is still struggling,” he said.
Business-to-business sales makes up one third of Acer’s total revenue, Thom said.
Taiwan’s technology protection rules prohibits Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) from producing 2-nanometer chips abroad, so the company must keep its most cutting-edge technology at home, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the remarks in response to concerns that TSMC might be forced to produce advanced 2-nanometer chips at its fabs in Arizona ahead of schedule after former US president Donald Trump was re-elected as the next US president on Tuesday. “Since Taiwan has related regulations to protect its own technologies, TSMC cannot produce 2-nanometer chips overseas currently,” Kuo said at a meeting of the legislature’s
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
RSS