"...Thanks to brisk demand from consumers, local CD-RW drive producers outperformed most of their electronics counterparts in their business results up to now, and they expect to grow consistently by the end of this year.

CD-RW drive business circles indicated that Taiwan had shipped some 1.21 million units of CD-RW drives in the first quarter of this year, and it is estimated to have shipped 2.05 million drives in the second quarter. Since demand continued to grow, the industry forecasts that this year's total shipments are expected to reach 10.6 million level, representing around one-fifth of the projected world production for this year. They attributed the increasing shipments to orders from three leading suppliers of personal computers in the United States: Hewlett-Packard Co., Apple Computer Inc., and Gateway Inc.

Industry analysts indicated that Taiwan producers are expected to ship more than 62 million CD-RW drives to the world market in 2002. They believed that the huge storage capacity of the machines and lower unit prices level compared with rewritable digital versatile disk (DVD-RW) drives would further ignite demand for CR-RW from consumers.

Lite-On Technology estimated it would ship five million CD-RW drives this year by obtaining orders from Gateway and Apple. Executives of Behavior Tech Computer Corp., Taiwan's second-largest CD drive maker, expected the company to ship one million CD-RW drives this year. Other local manufacturers also were optimistic about the CD-RW drive market in the next couple of years, as the drives have become standard equipment on PCs..." NULL