The third quarter numbers for ASUS was not very good. Especially since they released the Nexus 7 and a few other tablets. Although their brand new Transformer Pad Infinity TF701T was not yet on store shelves. They lost 26% in net profit compared to the third quarter of last year. Why did they lose so much? Well it wasn’t so much the fact that they did not put out many devices, but the fact that they had a one-time tax bill of about NT$1.52 billion. Which is equal to about US $52 million. While ASUS’ tax bill was staggering, the company knew they needed to update their lineup.
As expected, the Nexus 7 (2013) which they built along side Google, was widely accepted. In fact, I think most of the Android Headlines staff grabbed one, since it was a pretty cheap purchase. Especially compared to other tablets out there. But as many of you know, ASUS isn’t the most popular OEM out there. They only make one or two smartphones, which are not in major markets like the US, and they also have only been making “cheap” tablets lately. Although they did announce a couple of Transformer pads in the past month or two.
ASUS CFO David Chang did speak on this issue “We remain optimistic about the desktop and laptop market, but our priority is to make the company’s smartphone business turn a profit next year.” We’ve also heard that ASUS is planning to unveil a few new phones at CES in January 2014 from Las Vegas. There was also some big news coming from the CEO of ASUS who stated that they would be announcing a wearable device come Computex in Taipei next year. Although he had nothing else to say about that wearable.
Now for the real reason all of you are reading this post, ASUS notes that they are in talks with Google to build the third generation Nexus 7 tablet. Which we’d expect to debut in the summer of 2014, and probably be named the Nexus 7 (2014). ASUS is also expecting that a third Nexus 7 tablet would expand their tablet business from 6% of their overall portfolio to about 13%. Now that doesn’t seem like much, but when you think about it, that’s one device, and that’s a Nexus. Nexus devices don’t typically sell well. But then again Google never tells us how many Nexus devices they’ve sold so we can’t say whether they are or not.
There was also a rumor that ASUS was making the Nexus 10, which we all thought would be announced alongside the Nexus 5 last month, but the Nexus 10 was a no show. Hopefully we learn more on that one soon as well.