14 DAY TRIAL // Compal Electronics has some ambitious plans for this year. First of all, they wish to increase the total notebook output on the market and secondly, plans for a new production plant are high on the "To Do" list of Compal executives.
Ray Chen, the president of Compal, was cited by the news site DigiTimes, saying that most of the global notebook shipments, about 85 percent, are originating from a single region, the Shanghai region in China. So, he plans to expand his company into a different region, Vietnam, in order to minimize risks. The new production plant from Vietnam is expected to produce between 300.000 and 500.000 notebooks every month at slightly lower costs than the Shanghai plant. According to plans, production is scheduled to start in the last months of 2009 or just at the beginning of 2010.
At an investors' conference, the president of Compal also said the Company is raising its notebook PC shipment target for 2007 to 22 million units from the previous target figure of 20 million notebooks. Compal notebook shipments are expected to grow by 15 to 20 percent every month until the end of the year which means a huge increase over the 5.1 million units the company shipped during the second quarter. While the supply situation is not exactly a happy one as there is a critical shortage of several important hardware components like LCD panels, batteries, hard disks and power control ICs, the overall situation is expected to affect notebook production and shipments only in a small part.
During the same investors' conference, Ray Chen presented Compal's after tax profits, which reached $177.3 million in the first half on 2007, a 50 percent increase over the last year. Compal's board of directors also approved a plan to invest in the Taiwan-based Wan Yuen Technology Holding, which is specialized in the manufacturing of magnesium-alloy casing for notebooks, digital cameras and other consumer electronic products.