VIA sales down in February

VIA Technologies' sales came in at US$65.6m (NT$ 2.3bn) for February. This is around 15 per cent lower than January - not so surprising as most of its customers take a week off in Feb to celebrate the Chinese New Year.

More instructive, certainly for ironing out seasonal sales fluctuations, is the year-on-year comparison kindly supplied by the Taiwanese chipset-to-CPU designer. This shows that February 2002 sales were 29.15 per cent down on Feb 2001, when the company posted sales figures of US$92.6m.

Accumulated sales for January and Feb 2002 were US$143.14m - 20.75 per cent down on the same period last year (US$180.6m).

VIA ended 2001 with higher revenues than the year before, a worthy achievement considering the torpedoed state of its core markets. But looking at results so far this year, the company faces a tough challenge to ensure that it pulls off the same trick in 2002. ®