TAIPEI: Benq Corp, the branded electronics unit of Taiwan's Qisda Corp, has announced it expects to increase 10-fold its sale of liquid-crystal-display televisions on the mainland over 2008 sales.

The company projects sales of the flat-screen models in the world's fastest growing market will rise to 300,000 sets next year from 30,000 in 2008, Hank Horng, 47, who heads Benq's mainland business, said in an interview at Benq's headquarters in Taipei yesterday. The company is expected to sell 100,000 LCD TVs this year, he said.

Benq joins Samsung Electronics Co and LG Electronics Inc, the world's two biggest makers of TVs, in seeking to expand on the mainland, the fastest-growing major economy. The number of LCD TVs sold on the mainland may jump 87 percent to 25 million this year and will probably increase 32 percent in 2010, Austin, Texas-based researcher DisplaySearch said last month.

Benq currently has a small presence on the mainland because it has just started and focuses mainly on the eastern region, Horng said, adding the company plans to expand into the northern and mid-north parts of the mainland in the current quarter.

Qisda climbed 3.7 percent to close at NT$19.85 in Taipei trading yesterday. The stock has more than tripled this year, after falling to a record low of NT$5.17 in November last year. AU Optronics Corp, the world's third-biggest LCD maker in which Qisda owns about a 9 percent stake, declined 0.9 percent to NT$32.55 yesterday.

"It's the right strategy to pursue the TV market," since the mainland is poised to become the world's biggest LCD TV market in the coming years, and everything else in the consumer-electronics sector is either slowing or stagnating, said Roger Yu, an analyst at Polaris Securities Co in Taipei.

DisplaySearch last month predicted its full-year estimate for global LCD TV shipments to rise 24 percent to 130 million units, compared with an earlier prediction of 127 million sets, citing demand from the Chinese mainland and North America and as more consumers replace their bulkier cathode-ray tube (CRT) sets.

Horng said Taiwan remains Benq's biggest market for TVs, but the company expects the mainland to overtake Taiwan as the biggest market next year.

Benq sells TVs through RT-Mart, a hyper-mart owned by Taipei-based Ruentex Industries Ltd, in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Fujian provinces, Horng said. The company will expand its retail business through RT-Mart's outlets in Shandong, Hunan, Henan and Hebei this quarter, Horng added.

LCD TV unit sales on the Chinese mainland will exceed those in North America by 2011, the South Korea-based researcher DisplayBank forecast in August.

Bloomberg News

(HK Edition 10/16/2009 page2)