Siemens AG, the world's No. 4 mobile-phone maker, aims to gain 10 percent of China's market for handsets with a soccer promotion that may help it win sales from rivals such as Nokia Oyj and Motorola Inc.
"We don't put ourselves under market-share pressure, but 10 is the magic number for us," Rudi Lamprecht, head of Siemens' mobile unit, said after announcing the company's sponsorship of the Chinese National Soccer League.
Munich-based Siemens both makes and sells handsets in China, the world's largest cellphone market. While it ranks third in produc-tion there, it trails overseas and local competitors in sales because it exports three-quarters of its output.
Now it's aiming to raise the share it sells locally.
It accounted for about 4 percent of the 70 million handsets sold last year in China, according to government figures.
"What we are doing with the sponsorship is to help us generate awareness of our brand," Lamprecht said.
"There is no customer loyalty in the cell-phone market," he said, suggesting Siemens will try to win users away from other brands.
He didn't specify a target date for achieving the market-share goal, or say how much Siemens will spend to promote its name and logo under the sponsorship deal.
Siemens expects as many as 430 million handsets to be shipped globally this year, Lamprecht said, repeating an earlier forecast.
That's less than Nokia's forecast of 445 million and higher than the 417 million handsets shipped last year, according to Strategic Analytics, a market research company.
Siemens and its local partner in Shanghai produced 11.6 million, or 8.8 percent, of the 132 million handsets made in China last year, according to Chinese government figures.
The Shanghai factory, which last year upgraded its annual capacity to 15 million phones from 11 million, isn't yet working at full production, Lamprecht said.
Siemens lags in sales in China behind local makers such as TCL Mobile Communication Co and Ningbo Bird Co, as well as overseas rivals such as Motorola and Nokia.
At the same time, it's trying to steal a march on competitors by working with Chinese partners to develop a new mobile-phone system that, if chosen by the Chinese government, could threaten sales of Qualcomm Inc, Ericsson AB and other suppliers of equipment that uses the current standards.
Siemens and Datang Mobile Communications Equipment Ltd, a company backed by the government, have spent more than two years developing the high-speed wireless technology, known as time-division synchronous code-division multiple access.
The technology is now being tested in the city of Chongqing.
Lamprecht said Siemens expects to have network equipment using the new standard ready for commercial sale by year-end.
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