14 DAY TRIAL // With the steady recovery of the worldwide economy, most companies in the IT industry, whether hardware makers, component suppliers or technology developers, have generally seen an increase in revenues and marketing performance. Nevertheless, it seems that, in some instances, certain conditions may arise, which can impact upon a company's marketing performance quite strongly. Such is the case with ASRock and Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), both of which, according to recent reports, posted on-month revenue drops of over 20% for February.
Compared to January, ASRock's consolidated revenues dropped 25% in February, to NT$730 million. This is a rather significant drop, but, on-year, the sum actually represents a 16% increase. Combined, January and February showed consolidated revenues of NT$1.7 billion, up 38% on-year. As such, even despite the 25% drop, ASRock expects its Q1 revenues to stay flat compared to the same period last year, when shipments amounted to 1.76 million.
In total, the company aims to reach nine million shipments in 2010, a significant increase over last year's seven million. Still, the actual marketing performance of the hardware maker might be impacted upon by its currently low shipments of notebook and intelligent surveillance systems. Not only that, but even ASRock's barebone system sales are being quite strongly affected by a shortage of Blu-ray drives.
Unlike ASRock, ECS didn't exactly see any on-year increase. Its consolidated revenues for February were of NT$3.56 billion (US$112.02 million), down 35.51% on-year and 20.34% on-month. Combined revenues for January and February also dropped on-year, by 17.15%, to NT$8.04 billion. This occurred because ECS only shipped 1.03 million motherboards in February, which is 30.39% less compared with January's 1.48 million. The company expects its shipments to rise back to 1.5 million units in March.
The two main factors behind this large on-month drop were the fewer working days and the labor shortage in China. Revenues are expected to rise as these shortages are resolved.