Samsung Electronics Co, Asia's largest electronics maker by market value, plans to triple MP3 sales this year and unseat iPod-maker Apple Computer Inc as the world's top manufacturer of the portable music players by 2007.
The company plans to sell at least 5 million units this year from 1.7 million in 2004, Ahn Tai-ho, head of the Suwon, South Korea-based company's MP3 unit, said in Seoul today.
Samsung expects to sell about 1 million units in the first quarter and increase shipments to about 12 million next year, he said.
Samsung joins Sony Corp., and other electronics makers rushing to enter a market forecast to jump 50 percent to US$6.9 billion this year. Demand for the iPod, which can download and store thousands of digital songs in each machine, helped Apple more than quadruple its fiscal first-quarter profit this year.
"MP3s are basically one of the first things that young people buy nowadays" when they have the money, said Ahn, chief executive of Bluetek Co, which is 100 percent owned by Samsung Electronics. "This is the year we're really getting serious in MP3." In today's press conference the company unveiled six MP3 player models under its Yepp brand that will be introduced during the first half of the year. The models include the YH-J70, with a 30-gigabyte storage capacity.
Samsung will need to raise its market share to between 20 percent and 25 percent of global sales to be the industry's top producer, Ahn said. He said he expects Samsung, Sony and Apple to be the top-tier producers by 2007.
Sony last week announced in Las Vegas that it will sell a new line of flash memory-based MP3 players with up to 70 hours of battery life.
Still, Samsung's pretax profit margin for MP3s may fall to about 5 percent from about 10 percent now as competition intensifies and prices decline, Ahn said.
Samsung will focus its sales on MP3 players with flash- memory chips, which are smaller and can store fewer songs than the type that has hard disk drives, because of Apple's dominance in the market for HDD-type MP3s, Ahn said. Samsung plans to sell 4.2 million MP3 players with flash memory and about 800,000 with hard-disk drive in 2005, he said.
The company is the world's largest flash-memory maker.
The global market for MP3 players will probably rise to 35 million to 45 million units this year, from 20 million to 25 million units in 2004, he said. Next year, shipments may rise to 55 million units, he said.
Global MP3 shipments may fall short of industry predictions because some companies can procure parts cheaper by overstating projections, Ahn said.
El Segundo, California-based ISuppli Corp said last month that global MP3 shipments will rise to 58 million units this year from 37 million in 2004 and jump to 80 million in 2006. Sales will rise to $6.9 billion this year from $4.6 billion in 2004, according to ISuppli.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to