| Subject: Re: OUT OF BUSINESS?! |
Author:
John Shoemaker
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Date Posted: 04:33:54 08/14/99 Sat
In reply to:
Frank Salonga
's message, "OUT OF BUSINESS?!" on 20:50:16 08/13/99 Fri
> All right, what's the story? I went to the transmonde
> site tonight and got a nasty, nasty surprise. Anyone
> have anymore info?
I received this email from Karen Steinwachs (VP Marketing) a couple weeks ago:
Date: 7/30/1999 12:37:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: ksteinwachs@transmonde.com (Karen Steinwachs)
To: John560e@aol.com
Let me tell you the story about the inventory shortage. I hope to be
able to publish this soon. Our parent parent company, ASE Inc. is a huge
Taiwanese group of companies, run by two guys (basically). Jason Chang
(head honcho) is a very savvy business person, and when the asian crisis
happened decided it was a good time to expand. So, ASE Technologies (our
parent company) purchased a company here in the states called TV/Com -- they
design technology that goes into set top boxes, MPEG decoders, etc. TV/Com
is now part of ASE USA. Then, Jason decided that in addition to
semiconductor testing, he would expand semiconductor packaging...so he
formed ASE Plastics in Taiwan. That grew so fast that they began to run out
of physical plant. In the meantime, a ASE Inc. acquired a controlling
interest in a VERY large Taiwanese contract manufacturer called USI
(Universal Scientific Industrial). USI's main customers are IBM (Aptivas
and motherboards) and Lucent. USI also has a notebook computer division and
a very large facility in the middle of Taiwan. The decision was made to
move our notebook manufacturing out of our current location in Kaoshiung and
into the much larger (28 SMT lines) USI facility. Our old manufacturing
location in Kaoshiung would be used for ASE Plastics, and our now combined
notebook division would have much larger capacity and could go after the big
OEM opportunities. We were in final stages of upgrading our Vibrant
product -- basically moving it to AGP and Trident video, along with the
Intel MMC2 connector. The idea was/is to transfer that design to the new
facility -- and begin production of the Vibrant XLe with the new plant. We
also had the review in Portable Computing, which frankly, increased our
sales volume by 30% one month alone. The transition to the new plant has
had it's hiccups, and we ran out of inventory way before forecast. We do
hope to get the Vibrant XLe in the next few weeks.
In the meantime, ASE has continued to acquire vertical opportunities -- they
just recently purchased two of Motorola's manufacturing facilities in
Taiwan, so are becoming a very large, vertically oriented company.
So that's the story. Really all good stuff, but we've had to be quiet about
it because both ASE Inc and USI are publicly traded companies in Taiwan and
all that legal stuff about shares, boards, etc. had to be handled with no
leaks. It's all now accomplished -- we own a controlling interest in USI,
we own TV/Com and we hope to get back to selling notebooks soon.
Karen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm confused and feel mislead. Can't figure why Karen would send me
this email.
FWIW, the following was copied from on 8/14/99:
http://www.aseusa.com/ttiwarr.html
Transmonde Computer Warranty Coverage:
ASE Technologies (ASET) in Taiwan was the original manufacturer of
Transmonde notebook computers. ASE Technologies (USA) has been contracted
by ASET to service the notebook computers as follows:
If the computer is still under warranty, any parts and labor needed to
keep it working will be free of charge. However, you are responsible for
transporting and insuring the computer to and from our service depot.
If the computer is out of warranty, you are responsible for the costs of
any parts and labor needed to keep it working, as well as for transporting
and insuring it to and from our service depot.
Please contact us via fax to get an RMA form and further instructions.
Unfortunately, we are only able to respond to requests to return the computer
for service, and we are not able to provide any other technical support.
Contact us via fax at 1-714-739-3874.
Whatever ... John
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