PC maker Compal has had its profits take a good kicking thanks to a weakening demand for PCs and growing popularity of tablet devices.
In the outfit's annual report Compal, which is one of the biggest contract notebook makers, posted a 58.96 percent decline in profit year-on-year for the first quarter of this year The outfit made $120.8 million from January to last month which is nearly a third of what it made in the first quarter of last year. and was 24 percent lower than the previous quarter.
Compal president Ray Chen moaned that it was all caused by cannibalization from tablets which was a problem for the notebook market. However he forecast that the company’s shipments of notebooks in the second quarter would likely rise by 10 percent from the previous quarter.
Compal now expects to ship 48 million notebooks this year, down from a forecast of 55 million units in January. The company maintains it will ship 3.8 million tablet PCs, 8 million LCD TVs and 2 million all-in-one computers for the full year.
