Displays

Lite-On Monitor Production Lines Caught Fire, $7.72 Million Damage Estimations

The fire might affect the whole LCD industry

By Bogdan Botezatu, Hardware Editor

12th of February 2008, 11:38 GMT

Adjust text size:

The 'Light Up' part of the company's slogan seems to be a cruel joke

Hardware manufacturer Lite-On Technology has just confirmed that 14 of its LCD display production lines were partly destroyed in a recent fire. The incident seems to have been caused by an electrical

short circuit in the Lite-On facilities based in Dongguan, Southern China.

The fire started on February 3, and the company rushed to issue a Chinese-language press release reading that other LCD TV and monitor production lines were to be distributed in a manner that will allow them to cover the LCD monitor production lines. The press release also noted that the existing stock allows the company to deliver LCD display monitors for the next two months.

According to LCD market watchers, the monthly capacity of the Dongguan production base is about one million units but the fire will reduce the numbers by 700,000-750,000 units. The company's revenue might also decline this month down to $70-127 million (calculated at $100-170 per monitor).

"This could have a major impact on the landscape of the desktop monitor industry in the first and second quarters of 2008, but most probably in regards to share shift rather than in overall supply and demand," said DisplaySearch analyst Chris Connery.

Lite-On initially stated that the company was still assessing damages, but recent reports show that the preliminary damage is of about $7.72 million in the plant, $42.4 million in inventory and $20.9 million in equipment. The inventory damage itself would represent about 10% of Lite-On's quarterly shipments, and the fire is likely to affect the whole industry. Lite-On's customers will have to switch their orders to a new OEM supplier, which will take one or two months.

According to Baker's estimations, Lite-On supplied 22 percent of HP's monitors in the third quarter of last year, 20 percent for Dell and 19 percent for Lenovo. The Taiwanese company said that the damages will be fully covered by the insurance, but the whole impact on the LCD business needs further assessment.

TAGS:

Lite-On | LCD display | Dell | HP | BenQ

SEARCH THE NEWS ARCHIVE :

Today's News | Yesterday's News | News Archive

User opinions:

No user comments yet.

Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!

Share your opinion:

SUBMIT PROGRAM \| ADVERTISE \| GET HELP \| SEND US FEEDBACK \| RSS FEEDS \| ENTER NEWS SITE \| ENGLISH BOARD \| ROMANIAN FORUM
© 2001 - 2008 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and the Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.	Copyright Information \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use \| Update your software \| Archive

NEWS CATEGORIES: