ASUS HQ Makes Official Statement on Transformer Tablet Shortages

By Nicole Scott
6 May, 2011 8:15 pm

54 Comments

Living in Taipei we’ve often noticed that marketing people overseas don’t really know what’s going on with their products, not like the head quarters does anyways. There have been a lot of rumors floating around the internet around shortages of the ASUS Transformer first about volumes due to component shoratges, then from a ASUS UK rep talking about quality control issues. Then we heard that the Transformer shortages were already being openly addressed here in the Taiwanese media after the ASUS earnings call last week. So we contacted ASUSTek Spokesperson David Chang to get to the bottom of things.

When tasked with the question of how many Transformers are you currently producing monthly? We got a concrete response of an expected 100,000 units in May and 200,000+ units to be hitting the streets in June.

When asked when the shortage will be over Chang expects that “we will see a significant alleviation in the month of June”. This confirms what we’ve already been hearing about volumes increasing mid June. Chang also noted that “If the demand continues to increase substantially then we will have to continue to ramp up production in order to fulfill our customers’ demand.” Which is good news since the message appears to be loud and clear that we need more, a lot more!

Rumors around component shortage causing the tablet to be in short supply we not confirmed. ASUS simply didn’t expect such high demand for the 10 inch tablet with docking station, so the shortage is actually being caused by the high demand. Chang stated that “It really depends on the demand. The current demand surpasses our expectations by far.” So they are ramping up volumes next month, and looking at their projections for Q2 they are on track to achieve and surpass current sales goals of 300,000.

So it seems that all we had to do to get to the bottom of this was to head on over to the ASUS Head Quarters here in Taipei where they’ve been openly talking about the ASUS Transformer shortage for the past week! Until the next round of rumors appear, we’ve got word from the head quarters (not the word of some marketing guy in the UK) that the ASUS Transformer will be easier to get a hold of in June.

In the mean time while Transformer is hard to get you can check out our video review of the elusive tablet which we picked up (after a 3 hour search) here in Taipei.