14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, the month of February definitely did leave an imprint on virtually every company involved with Intel's defective series of chipsets, enough so that even Compal ended up with a serious drop in notebook shipments.
As consumers know, Intel's 6-Series Cougar Point chipset that was meant to support Sandy Bridge CPUs ended up with a serious design flaw.
Since it caused SATA 3.0 Gbps ports to degrade, all mainboards and notebooks based on it were recalled.
This left a veritable vacuum behind and had far-reaching consequences that took billions on the part of Intel and its partners to fix, a process that has not yet been totally finalized, since return and replace programs are still in effect, or soon will be.
Fortunately, fixed B3-stepping chipsets have since started shipping, so IT players are restoring their rate of sales, but the damage was done nonetheless.
That said, the month of February proved to be especially merciless, as it added fewer working days on top of this entire trouble.
As such, many companies, like ASRock and ECS, saw their shipments and, consequently, revenues drop sharply.
It is now reported that Compal went through an unfortunate month of its own, seeing notebook shipments decline by 18%.
For those that want numbers, Compal shipped about 2.7 million, falling short of the expected 2.9-3 million.
On that note, consolidated revenues, for February, were down 18.5% on month and 35.7% compared to the same month of 2010, leading to NT$43.57 billion, which is the equivalent of US$1.48 billion.
Either way, Compal hopes that it will be able to recover its losses in March and April, seeing as how shipments will rebound to over 4 million units.
On a related note, the LCD TV part of its business also fell somewhat, to 410,000 compared to January's 500,000. Meanwhile, 100,000 monitors were sold as well.