Taiwan Semiconductor Manufac-turing Co (TSMC,
It achieved the mark after its sales last year grew 26 percent to US$4.7 billion, according to Scottsdale, Arizona-based IC Insights. The only other company with higher sales growth was No. 2 Samsung Semiconductor, a unit of South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co, it said.
Samsung's chip sales rose 38 percent last year to US$8.7 billion, the report said.
Sales growth at Samsung and other Asian companies will be better than those of Japanese rivals this year, IC Insights said.
"In 2003, a major realignment of the Japanese semiconductor industry will continue," IC Insights said in a statement. "The Japanese companies' share has severely declined because of weakness in Japan's economy and capital-spending cutbacks by the Japanese semiconductor suppliers."
Chipmakers in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China will account for a quarter of the world's chip production by 2010, compared with 18 percent last year, IC Insights said.
Global chip sales probably will increase 12 percent this year to about US$174 billion after gaining 1.4 percent last year, according to market researcher Dataquest Inc. That still trails gains in 2000, when worldwide chip sales climbed 37 percent to a record US$204 billion.
The only company in the IC Insights rankings whose 2002 sales fell was Motorola Semiconductor, a unit of Motorola Inc.
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