Inventec acquires NB orders from Toshiba

Taipei, March 9, 2004 (CENS)--Inventec Corp., one of Taiwan's leading contract manufacturers of notebook personal computers, recently announced it has acquired orders for consumer-type notebook PCs from Toshiba Corp. of Japan for the first time ever.

With increased release of contract orders by Toshiba, Inventec said it would challenge one million NBs in shipment to the Japanese firm this year. With the acquisition of the contract orders, Inventec will become one of Toshiba's two largest contract manufacturers in Taiwan; the other one is Compal Electronics Inc.

Compal is currently concentrating on the contract manufacture of business-type NBs for the U.S.-based Hewlett Packard Inc. Recently the company has been active in manufacturing low-tier consumer electronic products, including NBs.

Several years ago Toshiba was the worlds' No.1 manufacturer of NBs. But in recent years, Toshiba has seen the ranking slip to No.3, behind Dell Corp. and HP, as the latter two firms have speeded up farming out production to Taiwan's contract manufacturers, including Quanta Computer Inc., Compal, Wistron Corp., and Inventec, to boost output at lower costs.

According to statistics compiled by the International Data Corp. (IDC), one of the world's leading market researchers, HP ranked first with shipment of 6.55 million NBs, followed by Dell with 5.94 million units and Toshiba 4.86 million units, last year. To catch up with the top-two NB suppliers and expand its market share, Toshiba has recently resolved to increase outsourcing orders and expand product lines of low-tier electronic products.

Inventec said it obtained orders for business-type NBs from Toshiba two years ago, but shipment has been hovering at around 200,000 units per year. Thanks to the acquisition of the consumer-type NBs, Inventec will see monthly shipment reach 100,000 units to Toshiba. The company said its overall revenue will easily break the NT$100 billion (US$3 billion) mark this year.

Seeing the emerging wave of machine replacement by enterprises, an institutional investor predicted Inventec will have great chance to challenge NT$10 billion (US$300.3 million) in revenue in March alone to hit a new monthly high.

It is expected Toshiba will shipp six million NBs this year and increase the ratio of outsourcing orders to over 40% this year from last year's 25%. Thanks to the increase of outsourcing orders, Compal will be able to ship 1.5 million NBs to Toshiba on the contract manufacturing basis this year.