Revenue growth for Taiwanese telecom operators could accelerate to 4 percent this year as faster technology upgrades may help boost usage of data-oriented services, market researcher International Data Corp (IDC) said yesterday.
This growing trend would help counter broader downward pressures suffered by most sectors in Taiwan — especially manufacturers of electronics — as consumer and corporate spending contracts amid the economic downturn, IDC said.
Led by Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), local telecom companies could make US$10.69 billion in revenues this year, up 3.9 percent from US$10.28 billion last year, IDC said.
Last year, revenues increased 3.2 percent, IDC said.
“The nation’s telecom sector has been little affected by the economic downturn,” IDC analyst Alan Tsao (曹永暉) told reporters on the sidelines of a press conference in Taipei yesterday.
“The main driver is the launch of new services using advanced technologies, such as location-based services,” Tsao said.
In recent years, local telecom companies have invested actively on building infrastructure using advanced technologies, graduating from second-generation (2G) to third-generation (3G) and then to 3.5G and WiMAX, enabling the introduction of more data-oriented services to offset falling revenues, Tsao said.
Supported by advanced technology and increased bandwidth, telecom companies have been able to offer new services and packages for smart handheld devices or netbooks to promote data usage, Tsao said.
Chunghwa Telecom’s sales of Apple Inc’s iPhone set an example, he said.
Telecom companies are gradually lowering prices for data services on smart phones to encourage more usage, Tsao said.
This year, data services could take a bigger share of revenues, reaching 11 percent or 12 percent, from 10 percent last year, Tsao said.
Backed by aggressiveness in bundling smart handheld devices with new service packages, revenues of smartphones including the iPhone and HTC Corp’s (宏達電) Touch Diamond series could experience double-digit growth this year from last year, Tsao said, without providing figures.
Health and emergency dispatching services via mobile phones on the WiMAX network are also becoming more popular and represent a promising growth area for local carriers, Tsao said.
Taiwan’s WiMAX license holders are scheduled to launch commercial services this summer. Many government-backed broadband projects using WiMAX technology began offering high-speed services last year.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by