Hewlett-Packard Taiwan Ltd (HP Taiwan), the nation's fourth-largest notebook vendor, is eyeing the commercial segment for new momentum in growth this year, a company executive said yesterday.
"The commercial segment will post higher growth than the consumer sector this year, as enterprises are allocating constant budgets to improve the company's technology infrastructure," Dennis Chen (
Citing statistics from research firm International Data Corp, he said that information technology spending in Taiwan would grow 5.5 percent this year, driven particularly by server-based computing.
To date, commercial PCs account for 55 percent of revenue in HP Taiwan's PC business, and Chen expects the figure to grow in the second half of this year.
HP yesterday launched a "thin client," the HP Compaq t5720, a compact network computer connected to a powerful server where data is stored and accessed.
The small computers do not have any storage drives, such as a CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, floppy disk or hard disk. This makes thin clients cheaper than desktop computers.
The thin client targets medium and large-sized enterprises in sectors such as banking, aviation, manufacturing, hospitality and government, according to Ellie Chiu (邱筱婷), the company's market development manager.
She said that the company predicts 20 percent growth in thin-client shipments this year over last year as more enterprises realize the benefits of the machines, including better information protection and the lower cost.
Overall, the consumer PC market in the first five months had been lackluster, dragged down by rising consumer bad debt in credit cards and cash cards, Chen said.
"Microsoft's push on Windows Media Center Edition has also failed to accelerate local adoption [in the] digital home," he said.
Affected by weak purchasing power, consumer electronics retailers reported a dip in business of 30 percent in the first three months of the year, according to a report by Chinese-language newspaper World Journal earlier this month.
Fortress -- Hong Kong's largest electronics and appliances operator which has been operating in Taiwan for eight years -- announced the closure of six outlets last month and will cut the current 11 stores to two later this year because of its financial burden.
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