Apple Supplier Pegatron Looking at Weak Q1: What About Q2?

For all the good news, there is also some not-so-good news. Pegatron expects first-quarter shipments from smartphones, tablets and video game console manufacturing to drop by 15% to 20%. Shipments of laptop PCs are expected to drop by 20% to 25% in the traditionally weak quarter following the generally strong holiday quarter. The first quarter also gets little in the way of new product launches.

The company’s CEO, Jason Cheng, said that Pegatron’s communications devices business has risen from 13% of revenues to 32% since 2010 and that the revenue share from computing devices has dropped from 67% to 38%. Cheng also said that he expects a turnaround in declining PC sales in the second half of 2014.

Apple now accounts for 40% of Pegatron’s revenues, according to an analyst cited in The Wall Street Journal, and there is widespread speculation that the company is about to begin manufacturing the next model of the iPhone. Pegatron trails only Hon Hai Precision Technology, aka Foxconn, as a supplier to Apple, and even though Apple accounts for a large share of Pegatron’s business, analysts say that it faces less risk than Foxconn if Apple continues to diversify its contract manufacturing base.

Pegatron is interesting to U.S. investors primarily as a marker for Apple. We didn’t learn anything here that we didn’t already know, except that even Pegatron is not talking about the second quarter. Apple has already said that first-quarter sales will be soft. Is that also going to be true for the next quarter?