After suffering a bitter setback in the printer market in the fourth quarter of last year, Hewlett-Packard Co announced yesterday that it has regained the first place in the market in the first quarter of this year.
"We did see sales dropping slightly in the last quarter of 2003 due to cutthroat competition from rivals," Richard Hu (
According to International Data Corp's (IDC) latest report, HP claimed 48.72 percent of the global color laser-printer market, up from 27.4 percent from the previous quarter.
Japan's Seiko Epson Corp took the second place with 34.55 percent, down from 50.25 percent three months ago, according to the report.
Hu attributed last year's fourth-quarter setback in Taiwan to Epson's big promotion package that bundled a BenQ Corp (明基電通) desktop computer with its color laser printers, which helped the company to secure 67 percent of the niche market. Epson recently announced that it will offer a BenQ Joybook 2000 computer to buyers of its color laser printers.
In response, HP slashed the prices of its color laserjet lineup and announced that it plans to start giving away scanners to customers who purchase its color laser printers, said King Chen (
Another factor that chipped away at HP's global market share is the emergence of new players in the market, Chen said.
While he did not name the new competitors, Dell Inc has been moving aggressively into the market with its own brand of printers. Dell announced last week that it will start selling printers for the corporate and home market that will reduce ink and toner costs by up to 64 percent.
Dell last year sold an estimated 1.5 million printers in its first nine months in the business. Analysts estimate that Dell will sell over 4 million printers this year. HP sold about 43.6 million printers last year.
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