14 DAY TRIAL // There were murmurs saying that ASUS wasn't as optimistic as it used to be about its laptop sales, but a new report has arisen, one that refutes the claim.
Of course, since this report has a third party as the source, it is just as potentially erroneous as the one that implied ASUS' reduced optimism in the first place. Nevertheless, we may as well pass it on.
Digitimes is the source of the information, or at least the channel through which said information has reached us.
ASUS had 4.4 million as the shipment goal for the April-June period, 2012.
Then, Dell reported having suffered a very heavy financial blow, one that caused concerns to rise on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE).
ASUS' shares dropped 5.34% because of that weak sentiment, on May 23.
It didn't help that its 4.1 million shipments of the first quarter caused a status decline on the European vendor ranking.
Fortunately, the Chinese market has proven healthy. ASUS will bet much on it and its potential for growth in 2012.
During the ongoing second quarter, ASUS hopes to sell 4.4 million notebooks, as well as 1.1 million netbooks and 1.2 million tablets.
For comparison, the outfit managed to ship 900,000 low-end laptops and 600,000 slates, respectively, in Q1 (January-March, 2012).
As for the second half of the year, we think it likely that ASUS will try to achieve a quarterly growth, especially knowing that new ASUS ZenBooks and the ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 are poised to debut over the next two months.
Overall, 17.5-19.5 million ASUS notebooks should be shipped in 2012, a strong figure after the 14.7 million of 2011. Add to that sales on every other market segment that ASUS has a stake in and there isn't all that much for the corporation to lose sleep over.