Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC Corp (宏達電) on Friday night unexpectedly revised its financial guidance for this quarter downward, saying that sales could be nearly 30 percent lower than previous estimates of NT$46 billion to NT$51 billion (US1.48 billion to US$1.64 billion), slashing its sales forecast to between NT$33 billion and NT$36 billion.
The company also expects to lose from NT$9.7 to NT$9.94 per share this quarter, compared with its previous forecast of earning between NT$0.06 and NT$0.34 per share, HTC said in a statement.
“The change in revenue outlook is due to slower demand for high-end Android devices and weaker-than-forecast sales in China,” the company said.
The change in guidance followed the firm’s monthly sales release, in which HTC reported sales of NT$10.78 billion last month, down 48.79 percent year-on-year and 20.38 percent month-on-month.
HTC chairwoman Cher Wang (王雪紅) on Tuesday apologized to shareholders for the firm’s poor performance.
The company now expects gross margin to range from 19 to 19.5 percent for this quarter, down from previous guidance of between 23 and 23.5 percent.
HTC attributed the downward revision to product mix change and reduced scale, adding that increasing competition has raised expenses for product promotions and therefore pushed up operating costs.
Adding to the company’s financial woes is a one-off impairment of NT$2.9 billion this quarter for idled assets and some prepaid expenses in the quarter, HTC said.
The revised sales guidance suggests that quarterly sales would plummet by 49.27 percent at most from last year’s NT$65.06 billion and by 20.48 percent at most from the previous quarter’s NT$41.5 billion.
SinoPac Securities Investment Service Co (永豐投顧) said HTC’s revised guidance reflects that the firm’s flagship model One M9 is selling “very poorly.”
“Apparently, HTC’s flagship One M9 and its variations failed to drive sales for the past two months,” a SinoPac analyst who declined to be named told the Taipei Times yesterday.
The analyst said that since HTC does not have plans to launch any new smartphone models this month, monthly sales are likely to be less than last month’s NT$10.78 billion.
“It is very likely that sales this quarter could drop about 50 percent from last year’s NT$65.06 billion,” the analyst said.
SinoPac now expects HTC to ship about 16 million smartphones this year, down from last year’s 20 million.
Although Wang told shareholders that the company plans to launch a “hero” product in October and bolster its smartphone segment, its core business, the analyst said HTC might report a net loss this year.
Last year, HTC reported a net income of NT$1.48 billion, or NT$1.8 per share.
HTC shares dropped 8.25 percent this week to NT$92.8 on Friday in Taipei trading.
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
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS