Competitive pricing of locally-made mobile phones has sent sales skyward, with Benq (
"Based on our handset-sales estimate for the first half of this year, four out of the top 10 mobile phones are local brands, while last year that number was zero," said Hsu Wei-heng (許維恆), a deputy manager at online mobile phone retailer Mobihome Co (摩比家).
Making the cut into the top 10 were Inventec Co's (英業達) OKWAP i108, OKWAP i66, Quanta Inc's (廣達) Q285 and Benq's S630i.
Following a massive advertising campaign, June sales of Benq handsets hit number one at Mobihome, surpassing other domestic and international brand mobile phones.
Meanwhile, over at Synnex Corp (聯強國際), the top brick and mortar seller of handsets, public acceptance of local brands is growing.
"Over the last five years, the best selling mobile phones were international brands, while last month, for the first time, Benq's S630i became one of our 10 best selling handsets," said Tu Wei-feng (涂偉豐), a product manager at Synnex. With 21 retail stores around Taiwan, the company shipped out about 1.2 million handset units during the first half of this year, accounting for some 42 percent of total market sales, Tu said.
Nokia and Motorola are still the most popular brands at Synnex.
Price, according to Mobihome's Hsu, is the key to sales of local brand mobile phone brands, which are NT$2,000 to NT$3,000 cheaper than foreign brands. And for teens who shop online, price is very important.
International-brand handset manufacturers spend big bucks on marketing and branding, and therefore there is no room for them to cut prices, he said.
"With Taiwan producing more than 50 percent of the world's cellphones, manufacturing ability is quite mature, but brand attractiveness has been relatively low," he added.
However, several local companies, such as Benq and OKWAP, began to invest more on design and marketing, and brand awareness has grown steadily.
"That's why these companies' handset market share is expanding," Hsu said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day