China's top dotcoms believe multimedia messaging services (MMS) will become a gold mine sustaining their profit growth, and have earmarked large sums for aggressive development, state Chinese media said yesterday.
Sohu.com Inc (搜狐), one of China's three large NADAQ-listed portals, plans "huge investment" this year in a bid to outpace its two major rivals, Sina.com and Netease.com, in tapping the market, Xinhua news agency said.
"The peak season for short text messages is over," Sohu's CEO Charles Zhang (
Unlike short messaging services (SMS), which allow transmissions of written text only, MMS enables users to send color pictures, animation, recorded sound and video.
At the end of last year, 8 million Chinese residents subscribed to MMS, and experts believe MMS for mobile subscribers will expand to an industry worth US$22 billion by 2008, according to Xinhua.
Sina.com Corp (
"Compared with Sina's 18 million SMS subscribers, the number of ... MMS users is still very small," said Sina's CEO Wang Yan (
"Hundreds of billions of short multimedia messages will have been sent by 2005, which will have generated a revenue no less than that of SMS."
The future of the industry hinges on how fast the government sets up the needed infrastructure.
China has been pushing the development of the third-generation technology, which allows transmission of voice, data and video, and high speed wireless Internet access 40 times faster than second-generation systems, Xinhua said.
"The rising MMS business ushers in a new wireless Internet era," said an industry expert. "It doesn't simply mean a reordering of Internet portals. It will redefine the market."
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