Nov. 25, 2002

Major Taiwan contract manufacturers of Personal Digital Assistents (PDAs)are luxuriating in a downpour of orders from famous international brands.

High Tech Computer Corp. recently clinched a contract production order from Hewlett-Packhard for the U.S. company’s first budged-priced pocket PC. Wistron Corp., formerly the design, manufacturing and services branch of Acer, began mass production and delivery of a pocket PC model to Dell Computer Corp. this month. Mitac International Corp. recenty also announced that its production of a US$299 pocket PC model for ViewSonic would greatly increase in the coming months.

At Comdex Fall 2002, Dell demonstrated its first poacket PC model, the Axim X5, which is manufactured in Taiwan by Wistron. It is expected to grab market share vom HP's iPAQ pocket PC series.

A senior Wistron official said in Taipei that his company shipped about 400,000 PDAs in the first half of the year and the volume is expected to reach 800,000 to one million units by the end of this year. After Dell successfully demonstrated the Axim X5, Wistron claimed that it has the chance to become the world's largest supplier of pocket PCs in 2003.

Wistron expects to register a record revenue this month as it started supplying both the pocket PCs to Dell and Xbox game consoles to Microsoft.