Price cuts to key components and corporate replacement demands are expected to further bolster the growth of the nation's contract notebook makers in the traditional high season during the second half of this year, analysts and company executives said yesterday.
For example, Intel Corp has cut its listing price of the first generation Centrino CPUs by around 30 percent after launching the new Dothan platform's CPUs last month, which forced the price of a 1.7GHz CPU to drop from US$420 to US$290.
"Besides the seasonal factors, price cuts for key components such as central-processing units [CPUs] are expected to boost the notebook market in the second half," said Joseph Lee (李強), an analyst at the Taipei-based Topology Research Institute (拓墣產業研究所).
Information-technology (IT) spending world wide is expected to grow by 5 percent to US$910 billion this year, bolstered by the economic rebound and rise in corporate IT expenditures to catch up with delayed infrastructure such as personal computers (PCs), according to International Data Corp (IDC).
IDC found that 42.6 percent of enterprises planned to increase their IT expenditures this year, up from 31.1 percent last year.
Notebook computers are likely to make up 22.7 percent of PCs purchased by companies in the next 12 months, compared to only 10.2 percent of notebooks within the existing corporate installed base, IDC said.
"Every two to three years makes up a cycle of the replacement demands," said Gary Lu (呂清雄), spokesman for Compal Electronics (仁寶), the world's second-largest notebook-computer maker, which expects to ship 8 million laptops this year.
"We have seen economic recovery this year and it is about time for the delayed corporate replacement demands to occur, as it has been four years since the last wave, triggered by Y2K {fears], which happened between 1999 and 2000," Lu said.
Stronger corporate replacement demands are expected to bolster the market in the second half of the year, JP Morgan Securities Co Taiwan branch said in a report released late last month.
Replacement demands are expected to benefit Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), the world's largest laptop maker, as it has exposure to between 50 percent and 60 percent of the corporate segment, JP Morgan added. Quanta projected last month it would ship 12 million laptops this year.
Inventec Co (英業達) is another player expected to see bright performance in the second half, supported by new orders from Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Toshiba Corp, whereas Compal may not do so well, due to its loss of HP's orders, said Molly Lin (林美如), an analyst at Polaris Securities Co (寶來證券).
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],”
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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