Inventec Corp’s (英業達) annual revenue this year might decline from last year’s NT$435.59 billion (US$13.93 billion) due to changes in its product portfolio, chairman Richard Lee (李詩欽) said yesterday.
“We maintain the annual shipment target for Inventec’s products at 100 million units compared with last year’s 70 million units, but the total revenue could drop year-on-year,” Lee told reporters after the firm’s annual general meeting in Taipei.
Lee said that notebook computer shipments this year are expected to be lower than last year, while the shipments of lower-priced tablet products could grow significantly, which could lead to a decline in overall sales in US dollar terms.
In the first five months of the year, Inventec’s cumulative sales totaled NT$148.79 billion, plummeting 38.24 percent from NT$187.03 billion in the same period last year.
As the first-quarter performance was not ideal, Lee said he was “a little bit” worried about sales this quarter, amid softer-than-expected PC demand.
“We will work harder next quarter to maintain our annual shipments target,” Lee said.
Inventec personal solution group president Fred Chang (張輝) said the company is cautiously optimistic about the launch of Microsoft Corp’s Windows 10 operating system potentially driving demand in the PC market.
Microsoft has promised to offer free upgrades for users of Windows 7 and 8, but Inventec president Huang Kuo-chun (黃國鈞) said users might still experience technical issues running the latest operating system with older notebooks.
Therefore, Inventec predicts replacement demand for new notebooks that run more smoothly using Windows 10, Huang said.
Lee said the company expects to ship 25 million units of PC-related products this year, with smartphone and handheld devices to reach 70 million units.
Shipments of cloud-computing items are expected to total 5 million units, driven by strong demand for servers, the company said.
David Ho (何代水), chief executive of handset subsidiary Inventec Appliance Corp (英華達), said the company had drafted a three-year plan for industrial automation development.
Inventec plans to spend between US$20 million and US$30 million to purchase 3,000 industrial robots by June next year in a bid to offset rising labor costs in China, he said.
After acquiring the robots next year, the company will invest in software and hardware integration to improve efficiency, Ho said.
By 2018, Inventec plans to establish a business unit for robotics, offering industrial automation solutions to the company’s existing clients, he said.
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