In response to the rising spending power of young people, Samsung Electronics Co launched a series of hip digital music players yesterday, aiming to strengthen its local share.
"This new series is a low-end model, which will enable us to grab more share in the local market and boost our unit shipments," said Annie Huang (
Sales of digital music players in Taiwan would total 1.2 million units this year, including those that support Mpeg-4 video format, market researcher GfK Marketing Services estimated.
PHOTO: CNA
The figure represents a 4 percent increase from last year, it said.
For the first four months, there were a total of 386,000 music players sold in Taiwan, with video-supported models representing 149,000 units, GfK figures showed.
In April, Transcend Information Inc (創見), a Taiwanese maker of memory modules and USBs, unseated Apple Inc's iPods for the first time to take the No. 1 spot with a line of affordably priced lower-end models.
Transcend garnered 13 percent of unit share. iPods took a 12 percent share and Samsung came in third with a 7 percent share, according to GfK tallies.
Samsung is confident it will secure the second brand in the local digital music player market this year, with a 15 percent market share and sales of 120,000 units, Lee Chul-young, president of its Taiwan branch, said in April.
Last year, it had a 9 percent share with 70,000 units sold, Lee said.
The new "U3" MP3 series boasts five choices of colors, with built-in universal-serial-bus (USB) plugs and a clip to attach the player to clothing, so they are a good gadget for teenagers during these happy summer holidays, she told reporters at a product launch yesterday.
They come with price tags of NT$2,290 (US$70) to NT$4,290, depending on size of the storage.
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