Taiwan's Acer Communications sees recovery in handsets
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's Acer Communications & Multimedia Inc, which makes mobile phones for Motorola, said on Monday it saw signs of a recovery in the battered industry and expected better sales in the second half.
"Sales in each month of the second half will begin to rise gradually," K.Y. Lee, Acer Communications' president told an investors' briefing. "It's not seasonal but the result of declining inventories and fresh demand from new handset models."
Demand for handsets with new GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), or so-called 2.5G technology, which allows for much faster transmission than the popular but slow GSM mobile standard, will shoot up in coming months, he said.
GPRS has been rolled out slowly in Europe, hampered by the lack of handsets. Only Motorola currently makes such phones in volumes, with leading cellphone maker Nokia due to start its release of GPRS models from the third quarter.
"We think the total handset shipments will surpass our original estimate of six million units," said Eric Yu, the company's chief financial officer. The company shipped around 4.8 million handsets last year.
LCD MONITOR SALES UPBEAT
Increased demand for liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors was another factor Acer Communications <2352> was so upbeat on the second half, Yu said. He said Acer Communications' shipments of LCD monitors was projected to reach 800,000 units in 2001. No comparative figures were available.
Cell phone operations accounted for 22 percent of the company's total sales in the first half of 2001, LCD monitor and cathode ray tubes (CRT) monitor business for 48 percent while other optical products made up the remaining 30 percent.
In the first half, the production of LCD monitors in Taiwan grew 36.1 percent from the same period a year ago, according to the semi-official Institute for Information Industry.
Acer Communications' July sales were T$3.76 billion, down 26.2 percent from the same month in 2000 but were slightly higher than June's T$3.43 billion.
Acer Communications is projecting to garner sales of T$59 billion in 2001, compared with T$48.6 billion in 2000. The 2001 pretax profit is estimated to reach T$3.07 billion, compared with last year's T$4.34 billion.
Multex Global Estimates consensus forecast for Acer Communication's 2001 net profit was T$2.713 billion with earnings per share at T$2.1.
On Monday, Acer Communications shares closed up T$0.10 or 0.3 percent at T$33.10, while the wider TAIEX market slid 1.21 percent. The stock has risen 36 percent since its year low of T$24.40 in mid-February
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