The mobile telecommunications sector is expected to grow steadily in the next five years with subscribers reaching 3 billion users worldwide by 2009, driven by emerging economies such as China and India, market watchers said yesterday.
The number of mobile network subscribers is expected to exceed 2 billion this year, Eric Lin (林山霖), a senior industry analyst at the Market Intelligence Center (市場情報中心), told a seminar on mobile communications in Taipei.
Users in the Asia-Pacific region constitute 44 percent of the total, with the largest amount of subscribers in China, Lin said.
Demand for low-priced handsets in emerging markets and purchases of new high-end handsets in developed countries to replace older phones as the third-generation (3G) mobile network is introduced will also drive up shipments, he said.
As a result, worldwide shipments of handsets are estimated to hit 772 million units this year, Lin said.
Nokia Oyj and Motorola Inc will continue to hold the lead in both emerging and developed markets, while South Korean players Samsung Electronics Co and LG Electronics will use their edge in consumer electronics to expand in the high-end handset segment.
Meanwhile, applications for high-end handsets will move beyond photo and digital music functions, said Day Ji-feng (戴基峰), another center analyst.
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