Taiwan will replace Europe as the world's second-largest manufacturer of digital video disc (DVD) players this year, with the nation's annual production expected to increase 348 percent year-on-year, the non-profit Institute of Information Industry (資策會) said yesterday.
Last year the country produced 742,000 sets of DVD players, up 14 percent from 2002. Output this year is expected to hit 3.3 million sets, up 348 percent from last year, said Arthur Lai (賴昱璋), an industrial analyst at the institute's Market Information Center (市場情報中心).
Taiwan's share of the global market will rise from 14 percent last year to 24 percent this year, which would push the country past Europe's 10 percent as the world's second-largest manufacturer, trailing only Japan, he said.
Japanese-made products are expected to account for about half of the global market, with European-made goods making up about 10 percent, followed by China-made products (8 percent) and South Korean-made (6 percent), Lai said.
Taiwanese manufacturers produced only 50,000 DVD players in the first six months of last year, but the production jumped to over 700,000 sets by the end of the year.
By value, Taiwan's total production of DVD players was worth only about US$14 million in the first half year of last year, skyrocketing 10-fold to reach US$140 million in the second half of the year, Lai added.
About 99 percent of the DVD players made in this country are for export.
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