To succeed in the digital camera brand-name business, Taiwanese companies should listen to what Asian customers need, a research firm said yesterday.
"They should learn the business models applied to cultures of different countries," Christopher Chute, International Data Corp's (IDC) senior research analyst, told a media gathering.
Chute said Taiwan's companies should start by forming a firmer foothold in the region, and take advantage of proximity and lower costs to lure Asian customers.
According to IDC, the local digital camera market is expected to expand by at least 10 percent this year. Last year, the sector grew 16 percent from the year earlier.
The global market is expected to report only single-digit growth for the next four years, he said.
Shipments of camera phones, meanwhile, are expected to expand by 84 percent in 2009, up from this year's 60 percent, generating a debate on whether more users will turn to camera phones and forgo digital cameras.
Chute said digital cameras will not be replaced by camera phones, as each offers different advantages.
In addition to the threat camera phones pose to the digital camera industry, more challenges are ahead, as there will be consolidation among digital camera vendors in the next two years, Chute said.
He expects this will cut the current 13 to 14 big international players down to under 10.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
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