UPDATE 1-Asustek shelves '09 targets, cites volatility

* shelves full-year guidance given in December

* shares up 1.1 pct, beating TAIEX's 0.5 pct gain (Adds detail)

TAIPEI Feb 18 (Reuters) - Netbook PC pioneer Asustek (2357.TW) of Taiwan has dumped its previous full-year targets given only two months ago, due to uncertainties caused by the global financial crisis.

"Under the current circumstance, we're now not able to see beyond the first quarter and will not be using those numbers any more," Chief Financial Officer David Chang told Reuters.

He did not offer a new projection.

In December, Asustek said it was aiming to sell 6.5 million laptop PCs, 7.2 million low-cost netbook PCs and 22 million motherboards.

The company last week gave relatively modest sales forecasts for the first quarter, saying it aimed to ship roughly 800,000 laptop PCs, 1 million of its Eee PC line of netbooks and 4.5-5 million motherboards. [ID:nTP001101]

Asustek pioneered the successful low-cost netbook PC in 2007, but has been gradually losing market share as bigger players such as Acer (2353.TW), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ.N) and Dell (DELL.O) enter the market.

Asustek posted its first net loss in the fourth quarter of last year, booking a T$2.8 billion ($82 million) loss for October-December. The company says it should return to profitability by the second quarter of this year.

At 0507 GMT, Asustek shares were up 1.1 percent, outperforming a 0.5 percent gain on the TAIEX .TWII index.

Analysts are generally bearish on the company, with a majority of those polled by Reuters rating the company a "sell" or "underweight".

However, Goldman Sachs recently removed Asustek from its "sell" list, saying the company had put the worst behind it.

"We expect Asustek's share price to rebound in the short term," Goldman analysts Henry King and Kevin Lu wrote in a research note released on Monday. (Reporting by Kelvin Soh, Editing by Ian Geoghegan)