Asustek Computer Inc

TWSE:2357

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q1

[Operator]

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 2021 first quarter online earnings call for ASUS. Today, we have our CFO and our co-CEOs on our call. First, our CFO, Mr. Nick Wu, will give a presentation on our financial results. Then Mr. Samson Hu and Mr. Hsu Hsien-Yuen will talk about our operations and our future outlook. The second part will be a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you.

So first, let's welcome Mr. Nick Wu, our CFO.

[Nick Wu, executive]

Okay. Good afternoon. Now please look to the fifth slide, where we have disclosed our brand profit and loss for the first quarter of 2021. Our net revenue was about TWD 108 billion for a growth year-over-year of 69%. Our gross margin percent grew by 22%, and our operating margin grew by 10.7%, which is a high point over the past few years. This reflects continued high demand in the PC market. Our brand innovation and our product value at our high product prices has made up for changes to our product costs. So you can see this expansion in our margins.

In addition, the growth of digital currencies in the first quarter has given us some additional growth for margins and prices, particularly in our graphics card products. So you can see that our operating profits are about TWD 11.6 billion, a growth of 302%, and net profit was about TWD 9.8 billion, a growth of over 10x, and our EPS is 13.2.

On Page 6, you can see our nonoperation items. The biggest item for the first quarter is TWD 665 million in exchange gain and as well as a TWD 200 million loss in investment income, mostly driven by our TWD 688 million loss in Askey. And this loss was because of Askey's transition to 5G and IoT product projects. The schedules of the projects and shortfalls in supply have resulted in some operational pressures over the short term.

On the seventh slide, you see our brand balance sheet. So let's look at some of the major items. In cash and equivalents, we have TWD 79.7 billion. For accounts receivable, we have around TWD 68.9 billion, and for inventory we have TWD 106.4 billion. For accounts payable, we have TWD 69.9 billion. So you can see that all of these items have expanded together with our operations. For 2021, we do believe that we will see quarter-over-quarter growth for every quarter, so we are building up reserves in our operating assets. In addition, because the industry overall is seeing demand had outstripped supply, we do see some material shortages. So in order to drive our operation growth, we are seeing some uneven inventories for materials. So that's why our inventory has grown as well. But we do believe this is still a healthy reserve for our future operational needs.

Next, please look to Slide #9. Our product mix for the first quarter. PC accounted for about 60%. Components, including graphics cards, motherboards, displays, et cetera, accounted for 39% and smartphones -- phones accounted for about 1%.

On Slide 10, you can see our region mix. In the first quarter, Europe accounted for about 36% of our revenues, Asia accounted for 40% and the Americas accounted for 24%.

Now please look to the 11th slide, which is our outlook for the second quarter. So overall, we see demand continuing to grow for the PC market, both ASUS and our -- for ASUS, both our planning and our innovative products, including our gaming PCs, our notebook PCs, our motherboards, our graphics cards, et cetera, are all seeing -- will all see growth in the future. So for the second quarter, we do still see some limits -- restrictions on supply. So we see a quarter-over-quarter growth of 5% to 10% for PCs. However, year-over-year, we will see a growth of 20% to 30%. In terms of components, because the second quarter is traditionally a low season for motherboards, we do see a decline of 5% to 10% quarter-over-quarter, but for -- on year-over-year, we still see 30% growth.

That concludes my presentation. And now let's welcome our co-CEOs to talk about our strategy and outlook.

[Hsien-Yuen Hsu, executive]

Good afternoon to our friends today. Thank you for taking the time to come on this earnings call.

So next, let me talk about our operations. First, my first slide is our key business objectives. I'm sure you've all seen this slide many times. However, these 3 key objectives have remained unchanged. So these are still our primary drivers of business.

First is managing market dynamics. Well, I think market -- the markets changed at -- throughout time. And right now, our main market -- the main change in the market is the raw material shortage. This is quite severe as we've said in the past, and we have employed many different methods to obtain more raw materials, including signing agreements with more vendors and using our own in-house R&D to explore the possibility of second sources or changing our board design to mitigate the shortage to facilitate new suppliers. So right now, the winners are the people who can get the materials, who can get the production capacity. So right now, we are looking at different companies in the industry, the most influential players, to try to mitigate our shortage problems. Of course, we are looking for systemic solutions to mitigate these problems, and we are still in heavy discussion. So if the discussion had -- if -- we will keep you all updated on these discussions.

In terms of expanding the addressable market, in the past, ASUS has focused on consumer products. But now we are devoting a lot of effort to driving our education in business markets. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the education market has seen rapid growth, and we hope to seize this opportunity. So we do see rapid growth in our education product lines.

Finally, our objective -- third objective is focusing on areas of growth. Right now, our most obvious growth areas include gaming and, as I said, education. In addition, we are also focusing on the creators market. We have devoted a lot of effort to it. In terms of our business planning, our business operations, we've devoted a lot of resources to these market segments. Particularly for creators, we are introducing many product innovations, and you'll be seeing a lot of these innovations at COMPUTEX later this month.

Next, I'm going to talk about our brand's golden triangle. This is something that our Chairman, Mr. Shih, has mentioned many times as well. ASUS is essentially still a very product-centered company. So when we design our products, we employ design thinking, we identify the pain points for our customers, and we provide solutions through our technology. Of course, we want to improve our market position as well, and we do this through CRM and connected services to provide better services and improve on our market position. Finally, NPS, the Net Promoter Score, is our key metric for evaluating our customers' opinions on our products and services. So this is a closed loop that helps us to improve our products, to improve our brand positioning and to improve the services we offer to our customers. So this is our golden triangle in terms of the ASUS brand.

So next, we can see, in the first quarter of 2021, this is our very strong revenue growth. In our open platform products, our revenues grew by 80% year-over-year, and in our system products, we grew by 70% year-over-year. A lot of this, of course, can be attributed to the pandemic, which has driven market demand. Of course, it is also because ASUS offers excellent products, very competitive products that has driven our growth.

So within the 80% growth for open platform products, I want to highlight 2 in particular. The first is our graphics cards and the second is our motherboards. ASUS has always been the #1 brand for motherboards. So in the past -- in our past calls, we haven't really talked about it. So today, I would like to take a little bit of time to give you a little bit of an overview in -- of our motherboards product line. We have always been the #1 share in the global motherboard product, and we have a very comprehensive product line, including the high-end ROG brand series and the mid-tier TUF and Prime, and we also have the Pro workstation series, and these products span both the Intel and the AMD platforms.

Also due to the development of AI, we have also introduced many AI features to our motherboard products. For example, for power users, a very important feature is overclocking. So we have AI overclocking. And of course, cooling is very important for high-performance products. So we also have AI cooling. And we -- in addition, we also have AI networking and noise canceling features. These features provide a better experience for our customers. For high-performance networking, we offer 2.5 gigahertz and 10 gigahertz Ethernet as well as Wi-Fi 6E. These are all the latest technologies.

In addition to our PC products, AIoT is also a key access for growth for ASUS. So we want to create a comprehensive ecosystem. In addition to our very high-product competence, we have also obtained better domain expertise through our investment of Portwell. We will provide AIoT solutions for areas including smart manufacturing, health care and retail. These are the 3 major application areas that we are focusing on right now.

So let me delve a little deeper into our Smart Health solutions. ASUS is -- will provide a very comprehensive Smart Health solution from preventative take care to digital diagnosis and telecare. In terms of preventative care, we offer wearable products that help users to monitor their cardiovascular disease -- their cardiovascular metrics, and it also helps detect sleep apnea and exercise, which will help doctors in their diagnosis. In terms of digital diagnosis, we offer, for example, medical imaging systems, early detection of cardiac disease and portable ultrasound solutions. And we also have many to one -- one-to-many solutions for doctors. And in terms of telecare, we offer long-term metric management for patients with an AI model to assess their risk. This is our telecare platform.

In the past, ASUS has offered excellent products, but we also have invested a lot in patents and design. So I would like to give you an overview of some of the recognition we have received recently. Recently, we were named one of the top 100 global innovators by Clarivate. This top 100 was selected from over 14,000 companies and organizations around the world. And in their evaluation, in their selection, they analyzed the patents held by each of these 14,000 organizations. And among the top 100 companies that they named, ASUS actually ranked number -- ranked in the top rank out of 4 for our patents. So this shows that ASUS holds many very important patents internationally and many international organizations actually refer to our patents as well. This shows that our investment in R&D has paid off. We have invested a lot into it.

In terms of design awards, we have also achieved much recognition. We received 15 wins at the 2021 iF DESIGN AWARD as well as 37 wins at the Red Dot design Awards. So these are fantastic -- this is a fantastic performance that proves that our innovation, our creative aspects are really based on consumer needs. We want to provide happy experiences for our users.

So next, my co-CEO, Samson Hu, will give us -- give you some more key points.

[Samson Hu, executive]

Thank you. Welcome to our friends. My name is Samson Hu.

Next, I will talk a little bit about our -- more about our performance in the first quarter of 2021. Last year, due to the pandemic's impact on our supply chain, we have a very low base for year-over-year growth. But the demand in the product has seen continued growth. So the overall PC market has seen excellent growth year-over-year. The overall market has grown by 55% year-over-year, and ASUS has performed even better than the market at 70% Y-o-Y. So better than the overall market.

In the next slide, we can see the different segments of our products. In the first quarter, we see that our growth in regular PCs exceeded 50% and our growth in gaming PCs was over 75%, and for commercial and education PCs, including Chromebooks, the revenue grew by over 170% year-over-year. So the performance is truly fantastic. So in terms of our Gaming business, as we've said many times in the past, ASUS is dedicated to providing the best user experience and the most comprehensive product line. In addition, we are extremely committed to building a community, an ecosystem of gamers, so that ROG can become the #1 gaming brand worldwide. So through this kind of strategic planning, we have established the #1 gaming portfolio in the industry. So you can see some of our product lines in this slide.

In the next slide, you can see that our Gaming product revenue as a share of our total revenue or the in-house share has been growing yearly. Last year, the in-house share for Gaming products reached 40%. And for this year so far, in the first quarter, the revenue share for Gaming products has actually exceeded 40%. So in the future, we will continue to drive growth for our Gaming product portfolio.

If we look at the different regions around the world, the different markets around the world, looking at gaming PC shipments for different products, you can see that in Europe, shipments grew by over 50%. In North America, it grew by over 85%. In the Asia Pacific, excluding China, it grew by over 75%. And in the key China -- Mainland China market, shipment growth was over 85%. So our total gaming PC business grew by over 75% in terms of shipments.

In addition to this growth in shipments, another key metric for us is the quality or the share of the high -- of the premium segment of gaming notebooks. So you can see that in Q1 2021, the premium market segment accounted for 22% of the overall market. But for ROG, for ASUS, the share of premium products was at 33%. So it is superior to the overall market, and this is the brand positioning we have always pursued.

So next slide, we are going to talk about our corporate sustainability goals. Actually, sustainability has always been very important to ASUS, even though in the past, we have not talked so much about it. So today, I'm going to give a little bit of time for this.

Climate action has always been a very important part of our sustainability goals. In 2016, we actually already set short-term targets for our climate action. However, the impact of climate change has only grown since then. So this year, actually last month in a public speech, I officially declared our newest climate action goals. So these goals can be discussed over 3 different aspects: first, our own operations; second, our supply chain; and third, our products. So in terms of our operations, our goal is to achieve, by 2035, 100% green energy use for our global operation centers. And in Taiwan, we hope to reach this goal by 2030. We want to achieve RE100, 100% renewable energy use. These are our operations goals.

As for our supply chain goals, this is a bigger challenge because the supply chain ecosystem is extremely complex with many upstream and downstream vendors. But we have set a fairly ambitious target of achieving a 30% reduction in carbon intensity through advising and contractually requiring reductions in carbon by 2025. This is our supply chain goal.

Finally, in terms of products, our goal is to ensure that all of our key products have average energy efficiencies that are 30% higher than the international ENERGY STAR standard. So for this goal, we can leverage our advantages in product design. And this can really help our contribution in terms of energy efficiency.

So this is a quick overview of our sustainability goals. Thank you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Okay. Our first question is from UBS. So UBS asks, across your ASUS' different product lines, what are the supply chain restrictions or shortages that are being faced?

[Unknown Executive]

Okay. I can quickly answer this question. As you all know, over the past year, the supply chain has faced a very large problem of semiconductor shortages. And of course, the semiconductor supply chain will involve all ICs, particularly the -- our 8-inch chips, and this affects our panels, which will, in turn, affect our system products, for example, our laptop computers. As for other ICs, including logic ICs, sound ICs, public power supply ICs and other peripheral I/O control ICs, for example, the USB interfaces, these are also seeing tighter supply. So when it comes to ICs, this will affect our system products, our graphics cards, our motherboards. These will all be affected. So the crucial issue is still the semiconductor shortage, because the semiconductor supply chain doesn't just serve the PC industry. It also serves the smartphone industry, the automotive industry, et cetera. So the impact of the semiconductor shortage is very large and goes across all industries. So for ASUS, we will continue to collaborate with our supply chain partners, for example, leveraging our own R&D to help mitigate these shortages.

[Operator]

Our second question is from JPMorgan. So JPMorgan asks, what is the inventory like in channels for notebook computers? And will it continue to grow next in the second half of the year? What is the visibility?

[Unknown Executive]

Well, this is something we're very concerned about, because since the outbreak of COVID-19 last year, demand has always outstripped supply in the market. So we are monitoring inventory in our channels. This year, up to now, what we see is that our sales, the products sold to end customers still actually exceeds our shipments to the channels. So this shows that the inventory in the channels is still going down, is still declining. Of course, this will vary across different markets and regions. But from what we're seeing is still that the market demand is very strong and the supply continues to be unmet.

So from what we are seeing from our sales channel is that, up until the second half of the year, we still see very strong growth momentum for shipments. But for next year, visibility is lower because there are still some factors that will affect this. For example, how vaccines will affect the pandemic and whether the shortages can be mitigated. So as I said, right now, what we're seeing is that the -- our shipments this year will be quite high. We're seeing high growth. But for next year, we'll have to keep an eye on it.

[Operator]

Our third question is still from JPMorgan, who is asking about the high losses for Askey. So if the components are still in a -- facing shortages, how can these losses be mitigated?

[Unknown Executive]

Okay. I will take this question. So the shortage of components is an industry-wide supply chain problem. So this is not something that is within Askey's control, in particular, for network components, these are unique parts. So there's very little choice available. This is something we need to -- this is a reality we need to confront. So in terms of controlling our losses, we are requiring Askey to take some measures, including lowering their expenses. For example, their R&D expenses, their -- and their marketing expenses. In terms of their component shortages, of course, shortages are not even. Some components might be in shortage, but because these components are in shortage, some of the other components that are in a set with them may actually see oversupply or too much inventory. So we are requiring them to do better control of their inventory. These are the 2 major measures that we are requiring Askey to take, and we are in constant review of these measures.

[Operator]

These are -- JPMorgan has 2 more questions. The third question is, if components are still in short supply in the second quarter and the price is still going up, why do you forecast quarter-over-quarter decline?

[Unknown Executive]

Well, for this one, I think it's true that remote work and remote education is a major trend, and it's driving strong demand for computers -- for laptop computers. But for components, it's more closely linked to the desktop computer market. So it's still a positive trend, but it's more moderately so. That's why, in the second quarter, because this is a traditional low season for motherboards, and we are looking at supplies and inventory limits, so we do see a slight quarter-to-quarter decline in terms of our motherboards and graphics card products. But year-over-year, we still see 30% growth. It's still significant and healthy growth.

[Operator]

The last question from JPMorgan is, how do you see the gross margins for the second quarter?

[Unknown Executive]

Well, since PC demand continues to be healthy and our strategy remains competitive, our products remain competitive and our CEOs mentioned -- CEO -- our CEOs mentioned supply chain cooperation to mitigate the shortages. So we foresee healthy margins for the second margin. That is what we can say for now.

[Operator]

The next question is from [Anu], so it's about the phone -- it's about the ROG phones. With ROG phones and ZenFone 8, how have sales and market feedback been? And what is the long-term plan for ASUS for the phone market?

[Unknown Executive]

Okay. I'll take this question. As we mentioned in the last earnings call, we have seen the preorders for the ROG 5 phone. And now when it comes to actual sales from our partner Tencent, what we are hearing is that the ROG 5, in the over RMB 3,500 market, we are first in market share. And we have also done some data collection on our own. And what we see is that our market share of the over RMB 3,500 market is over 30%, because when we look at the e-commerce platforms in China, what we're seeing is that the RedMagic 6 is only about 50% of our sales. Xiaomi's Black Shark 4 Pro is about 40% of us and the Legion Phone Duel is about 10% of our sales. So in terms of the high-end market, over RMB 3,500, we have a quite pretty high share.

We focused on gaming and power users, of course, because we wanted to focus on an underserved market that we believe has very high growth potential. So once we succeed in this particular market segment, we'll obviously gain a higher market share. But -- so now looking back, of course, right now, no marketing research firms have really given a rigorous definition of the gaming phone product segment. So using our own definitions, what we see is that in the ROG II generation, the total addressable market, the TAM was about 0.6 million. in the ROG III generation, we see a TAM of about 0.9 million. But now in the ROG 5 generation, if we're talking about the RMB 3,500-plus market, we are seeing a total addressable market of 1 million to 1.2 million. But after all this hard work over the generations, the gaming phone market is not just high-end anymore. There are also actually entry level gaming phones that are at a price point of about RMB 1,999 and above. So if we count this entry segment, the total TAM is about 2 million to 2.5 million. So from ROG II to now, to ROG 5, we actually see that the market has expanded to 4x its original size. So this is very much aligned with our goal.

Of course, there is still a pretty big difference between the market segments. There's the RMB 2,000 market and there's the RMB 3,500 market. And we are seeing a pretty big growth in the RMB 2,000 to RMB 3,500 market segment. So in the future, we may adjust some of our strategy to address this market. Because right now, the ROG 5 is very much focused on the high end. This year, we believe that total sales for ROG 5 will reach 400,000. This is excellent growth. But of course, we do want high overall sales, even higher overall sales in the future. So as I said, we will continue to observe changes in the total addressable market to see if we need to make some adjustments in our product options.

[Operator]

Our next question, we have 2 questions from DigiTimes. The first question is, we see price increases for both upstream and downstream vendors in the PC industry. So what do you see in terms of pricing for the second and third quarters?

[Unknown Executive]

I will answer this. In our last earnings call, we've talked about the same issue, because right now, the supply chain is seeing very, very strong product -- market demand. But we are also seeing severe shortages in terms of the supply chain. Of course, looking at this more positively, this shows that the entire value chain is upgrading. The value is increasing. So we do have a fairly optimistic outlook on this. For our upstream vendors -- our upstream suppliers, if they increase their pricing, we do understand this, and we will simply adjust our own products, our own end pricing to reflect this increase in cost. The entirety of the cost increase will be reflected in our price quotes for our channel customers and they can understand that as well. So overall, across the entire value chain, we are seeing very high growth in value and the industry is growing. That is how we see this trend. So any increases in cost will be reflected in our own pricing, and our customers also understand and accept this.

[Operator]

The second question from DigiTimes, the net gross margin for ASUS in the first quarter has grown. Is this mostly because of the graphics card products?

[Unknown Executive]

I'll take this as well. Of course, because the graphic card product line is facing the worst shortage, the price increase is the highest. So of course, this is a very big contribution to our margins. But the gross margins growth in the first quarter is not just attributed to graphics cards. It's also our system products, our gaming laptops, our consumer laptops, those all see -- saw very healthy margins as well. Of course, these high margins are driven by 2 main factors. The first one is that it reflects our cost increases; and second, it's also because, over the years, ASUS has worked very hard to improve our product competitiveness, we -- to offer the best experience for our users. And we think that our consumers recognize this value, which has also contributed to our margins as well. So these are the 2 factors driving margin growth.

[Operator]

Okay. The next question is from Fubon. What is ASUS setting a 2-digit growth target for laptop shipments? In the -- if there is a new normal in the PC market, how will ASUS maintain its industry-leading growth?

[Unknown Executive]

Okay. I'll answer this question. Of course, last year, when we were developing our business plan for this year, we had very high expectations for our business this year. Our -- we set our targets last year that -- we set the goal that for gaming and consumer PCs, we wanted to outperform the market by 10%. And for the commercial and education markets, we wanted year-over-year growth of over 100%. These are the targets that we're working toward.

Of course, right now, because of the pandemic, market demand is very strong. So I'm sure that all brands are feeling this. The consumer demand is very, very strong. And internally, we are also discussing the prospects for maintaining this industry-leading growth in the post-pandemic era. And this will have to go back to our golden triangle for the ASUS brand. The most important thing is to start from our products. As you can see in recent years, ASUS has maintained our rapid pace of product innovation. In our Gaming segment, as you might know, our G14 notebook has an extra LED display that was very well received in the market. And this year, we also introduced a 13-inch foldable gaming machine with a box for an external graphics card This design was also very unique, and we made these designs with the goal of being -- of communicating with even more customers.

And in terms of our consumer laptops, we also have a lot of innovation. For example, the ScreenPad Plus, which has seeing very good responses. And for creators, we also have many unique designs this year that you will see in COMPUTEX. I cannot reveal them at this moment, but we will offer better experiences for our users. And ASUS differentiates our products through innovation. And we hope that through innovation, we can provide better user experiences, which will help us achieve industry-leading growth.

[Operator]

Our next question is from UBS. So in the last quarter, ASUS mentioned that the supply shortfall is at 20% to 30%. Will -- does ASUS forecast an improvement for the second quarter?

[Unknown Executive]

Well, our supply chain is still facing shortages. Of course, this is a happy headache because it means that demand is very high. Last time, we mentioned that we are seeing a gap of 20% to 30% in supplies. For the second quarter of this year, I would say that we do not see significant improvement. The gap will remain at around 30%. And in particular, we are seeing for IC products. In the beginning, the worst shortage was with IC drive -- with driver ICs. But now we're seeing Codex sound ICs are also facing severe shortages. And for the second quarter and even the start of the third quarter, we are also seeing some warning signals for peripheral I/O ICs. So this is what we're seeing. And we are working with our supplier partners for these IC products to discuss our response.

So overall, IC remains the biggest problem with our supply chain, and the number of IC types facing shortages is still increasing. So for the second and third quarters, we see very little improvement compared to the fourth quarter last year. We are still seeing shortfalls of 25% to 30%. We are trying our best to help our vendors. We are discussing with them what we can do and what they can do to mitigate these shortages.

[Operator]

The next question is from Apple Daily. So with the pandemic worsening in Taiwan, is ASUS taking any management measures? And will this affect operations this year?

[Unknown Executive]

Well, I'm sure everybody is very curious about this because we do see a rapid increase of local cases in the past few days. So to answer this question, starting -- when the pandemic started last year, we started very early to form a response team. But at that time, the team was a temporary organization. Later, we decided that this should be an opportunity to introduce the BCM structure organization here in ASUS. So we started this in the second half of last year. And of course, the pandemic response is a very important part of our BCM to ensure that our company can maintain operations even during the pandemic.

So to answer this question, we have developed response plans last year. And our response -- we have different responses for different levels of the pandemic. We have red, yellow and green phases. And these phases are based on the CECC's declaration of different phases of the pandemic. So we have conducted practice drills as well to test our internal IT systems, the possibility of implementing A and B shifts and how this will affect our work efficiency, our equipment, our software, et cetera, if there is anything that we need to do in preparation. After 2 rounds of preparation, we do think that we have a pretty good handle on things. Things are progressing quite smoothly. So even with an uptick in the pandemic, we do believe that everything can go according to plan. So we believe that the pandemic's impact on our operations will be foreseeable and controllable.

[Operator]

Okay. The next question is from UBS. Can ASUS share a little bit about its efforts and strategies for the commercial and educational PC segments?

[Unknown Executive]

Yes, we mentioned that when it comes to commercial and education, our goal is to achieve double-digit growth for this year. For our education segment, right now, our key product is our Chromebook product line. ASUS is, relatively speaking, a latecomer to the Chromebook market. So our strategy cannot revolve around head-to-head competition in mainstream product lines. So our cooperation with Google has focused on the high-end market. Google has shared some data with us showing that in the market segment of USD 499 plus, our market share is around 30%. So this is a pretty high market share. I believe it is #1 in this market segment. So we do hope that we're -- we'll be able to establish a good reputation in this high-end segment, and then we can leverage this reputation to compete better in the mainstream segment. And we believe that this strategy is paying off and that growth is actually growing quite rapidly in Chromebooks. We're seeing over 100% growth.

In terms of commercial notebooks, the commercial laptops, we will focus on SMB. And this is based on our successes in the consumer segment. We do need to make very -- to have very diligent work in doing this because B2B business is quite different from B2C business. The customers want different things. So right now, we're actually devoting a lot of time to building up our infrastructure because commercial customers, some of them require, for example, local configurations. So in these cases, you need to have partners in local markets so that they can do these configurations for you. So right now, in the commercial notebook market, we are still building up this infrastructure. And so we -- it's probably going to take some time for these investments to pay off. But we will work hard to complete this infrastructure so that our commercial market segment can make more visible contributions to the company's performance.

[Operator]

Okay. I believe that we have answered most of the questions ask through this online interface, and we are about out of time. So we will end this earnings call soon. Let me just invite our 2 co-CEOs to give some closing remarks.

[Hsien-Yuen Hsu, executive]

First, thank you to our friends in the media and our investors for your interest in ASUS. Of course, the pandemic is a major crisis. But if we face it well, we -- it can also be an opportunity. Everybody in ASUS is working very hard to do this, to turn the crisis into an opportunity. And I think our first quarter performance reflects that. Of course, there will be many challenges in the future, and we will work hard to do even better for all of our shareholders and investors. And finally, of course, with the uptick in the pandemic, we also wish you all good health. Thank you.

[Samson Hu, executive]

Okay. Thank you to all our friends in the media and our investors for your support for ASUS. Of course, the pandemic has actually brought a lot of positive benefits to the PC industry. But of course, we still look forward to the pandemic ending because of the enormous impact in our health and our lives. However, even in the post-pandemic era, we believe the continued transition to digital will continue. So we are still optimistic about the PC industry, both now and after the pandemic. ASUS has improved its product competitiveness and its operations. So we are confident in seizing that -- we are confident that we will be able to seize any opportunities during and after the pandemic. Once again, thank you all. And we wish you good health because, as we've said, the pandemic is worsening here in Taiwan. So stay careful. Thank you.

[Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]