14 DAY TRIAL // Asustek Computer, a well established and liked computer hardware manufacturing company which is better known after its Asus brand, looks at making it into the top five notebook producers and vendors within the next few years, according to Jerry Shen, general president of Asustek's AOOP Business Group. In order to jump from its current eighth or ninth place on the mobile computing market to a place very near the top, Asus plans an aggressive marketing plan coupled with a wide range of both entry level and high end laptops and notebooks.
As the Asustek Computer manufacturing company is also working as a contract producer for other computer brands, its own Asus brand is just a small part of the entire business, accounting for just 36 percent of the all registered Asustek sales, which marks an improvement over the 23 percent registered during the first quarter of the year. As Asustek will focus itself on developing the low cost Eee PC, its brand business sales will oscillate between 30 and 50 percent of all incoming revenues. Jerry Shen also said that the company may introduce one more low cost, entry level notebook in the near future, but that project is still in the evaluation phase.
In order to consolidate its position on the mobile computing market Asus plans to produce and ship between 200,000 and 300,000 Eee PCs by the end of this year and the company's plans for the following year are staggering as it hopes to ship low cost notebooks in much higher numbers: three million units at least. As the notebook manufacturers are currently facing some pretty serious components shortages, Asustek said that its internal inventories and supplies of CPUs, chipsets, flash memory and DRAM are sufficient at present but at the same time it is facing problems with LCD panels and battery shortages. The first wave of Asus Eee PCs are expected to hit the retail market in the second half of September and they will feature a 4GB solid state disk (SSD for short) and 512MB memory according to the news site digitimes.
While the contract manufacturing business dropped by more than 40 percent in the second quarter of 2007, the company registered some record shipments thanks to its own brand and also notable profits of $207 million. Revenues for the third quarter are expected to rise by 20 percent, while total annual revenues will most probably increase by at least 30 percent.