Asus staggers into summer heatwave thirsty for sales, sweating profit

The fire raging across the traditional PC industry has reached the door of Taiwanese titan Asus - which watched its sales and profits go up in smoke.

The world's fifth largest PC maker - which has done a better job than many of its peers in traversing the notebook market's shift to tabs - posted a decline in both the top and bottom lines during the second quarter of 2013.

According to unaudited figures, pre-tax income fell 18.5 per cent sequentially to NT$5.89bn (£128m) and was down 6.5 per cent on a year ago.

Sales also also fell steeply in terms of a quarter-on-quarter comparison, down 12.5 per cent from Q1 to NT$99.7bn, but moved up nearly six per cent on a year ago.

Shipments numbers for the second quarter from Gartner showed Asus sold 4.59 million units versus 5.7 million a year earlier, representing a decline of 20.5 per cent in a sector that fell 10.9 per cent.

In terms of fondleslabs, Asus was the third biggest player - behind Samsung and Apple - according to Canalys data with 3.2 million shipments but some 2 million of these were Nexus 7 devices built for Google.

It is worth bearing in mind that branded tablets have a lower average selling price than notebooks, and ones that are made under contract manufacturing will be even less profitable.

Asus did not comment. ®