Inventec has announced revenues of NT$31.94 billion (US$990 million) for May, an increase of 54.7% on month and 11.8% on year, with notebook shipments reaching 1.5 million units. However, the company's January-May revenues dropped 11.7% on year to reach NT$133.16 billion.

Although Inventec lost its Hewlett-Packard (HP) netbook orders to Quanta Computer in the first quarter of 2010, the company gained some of Toshiba's new notebook orders, which helped push up its May shipments, according to market watchers.

Inventec estimates its notebook shipments will grow 10-15% sequentially in the second quarter with the shipment ratio for the first and second halves of the year to be 4:6. However, profit from Toshiba's notebook orders is rather low compared to most other orders, and that proportion to total shipments is expected to rise in the second quarter, so Inventec's gross margin for the second quarter will unlikely match its first quarter rate of 4.5%, the market watchers noted.

As for other first-tier makers' May performance, market watchers estimates that Compal had shipments of 4.1 million units, Wistron had 2.1 million units and Quanta had 4 million units.