Asus CFO: Nexus 7 sales close to 1 million per month

Taiwanese PC and tablet maker Asus' chief financial officer David Chang told The Wall Street Journal that sales of the Google-branded Nexus 7 tablet are closing in one million units per month.

The Android-powered 7-inch tablet, priced at $199 for the base model, hobbled along with a good albeit slow start by today's standards, according to Cheng, but sales figures picked up rapidly this month. 

Chang told the Journal: "At the beginning, it was, for instance, 500K units a month, then maybe 600, 700K. This latest month, it was close to 1 million."

Asus' third quarter earnings were reported on Tuesday, with the Taiwanese technology maker beating profit estimates by a long shot. The firm said its notebook range was faring well at around 5 million shipments per month, but its tablet sales were far better than expected.

The PC and tablet maker said its tablet shipments have jumped from 800,000 in the second quarter to 2.3 million shipments in the third quarter, an increase of almost three-fold. However, with figures that the Nexus 7 is shipping at close to one million units a month, Asus' tablet sales figures will likely continue to rocket ahead of PC sales by the end of the lucrative fourth quarter.

Asus' forecast for the fourth quarter remains modest, with the expectation that its tablet sales will jump by 13 percent to 2.6 million shipments, and as many as 10 million units in 2013.

With the iPad mini arriving in homes around the U.S. and Europe and further afield, Asus will have a long way to go before it can beat Apple's figures of 14 million sales in the past quarter alone.