Taiwan’s 2009 WiMAX Equipment Shipments Forecast to Double

Ken Liu

Taipei, Jan. 22, 2009 (CENS)--GemTek Technology Co., Ltd. and Accton Wireless Broadband (AWB) Corporation separately estimated their shipments of consumer-end WiMAX equipment to double this year based on upcoming rollouts of WiMAX services by Spring Nextel of the USA and Japanese service providers.

Taiwanese equipment suppliers pointed out that in addition to upcoming rollout of the services by American and Japanese telecom carriers, emerging economies are also widely deploying broadband wireless networks, likely further generating demand for WiMAX machines.

Gemtek forecast its shipment to likely double to one million units this year relative to 2008. AWB estimated its shipment to surge to 250,000 systems by the end of this year from last year`s 100,000 systems or so, with the maker having mainly shipped CPE, USB cards and PC cards as WiMAX products throughout 2008.

ZyXel Communications Corp. has begun delivering the equipment to Sprint Nextel and expects contracts from Alcatel-Lucent to steadily increase this year. Institutional investors estimated WiMAX sales as a percentage of the company’s revenue to rise to 6% this year from last year 4%.

Taiwan’s WiMAX Equipment Suppliers and 2009 Shipment Projections

Company	Technology Type	Main Products	Shipment Projections
Gemtek	802.16d wireline and 802.16e mobile types	Indoor and outdoor CPE, WiFi/WiMAX embedded module	One million sets
AWB	802.16e mobile type	Indoor and outdoor CPE, USB cards and PC cards	250,000 sets
Zyxel	802.16e mobile type	Indoor and outdoor CPE, USB cards, PC cards, fetocell	WiMAX sales to rise to 6% of total revenue from 4%

Sources: institutional investors