I'll confess I'm a bit of an Asus fan – and have been since dropping £200 on the first-gen 7in Eee PC nearly five years ago now. It's a painfully slow doorstop now, but back then it was pretty hot stuff.
So I'm pleased to see Q3's beancount has left Jonney Shih and friends a bit of cash on the hip for the festive season – to the tune of $230m in net profits, up 43% from this time last year.
That might be small potatoes coming from last week's billion-dollar Apple and Samsung announcements, but it'll do Asus perfectly nicely we suspect.
And it's not hard to work out what's making the difference versus 12 months ago: the Asus-made Google Nexus 7 tablet.
Asus CFO confirmed as much in comments to the Wall Street Journal (sadly back behind the paywall again after briefly ditching it for Hurricane Sandy), saying that the Android 4.1 slate – which has just been bumped up to a 32GB internal memory and 3G capabilities – sold close to a million units last month.
That's building from an initial 500,000 or so per month – not bad considering analysts were cautiously suggesting a figure of one million for the whole quarter as recently as two weeks ago.
And with the 32GB version having already replaced the 16GB Nexus 7 at £199, with the smaller-capacity model now just £159, there's no reason to think the good times aren't going to keep on coming.
Via Slashgear
