Canon Inc, the world’s largest digital camera manufacturer, expects 20 percent growth in camera sales at this year’s Taipei Softex Show compared with its sales at the gadget expo last year.
The company is also anticipating a year-on-year increase of between 15 percent and 20 percent in sales of photo inkjet printers at the consumer show being held at the Taipei World Trade Center’s Exhibition Hall I, Jesse Su (蘇惠璋), Canon Taiwan’s director and general manager of consumer image and information, told the Taipei Times yesterday.
Buoyed by the government’s issuance of consumer vouchers, Canon experienced a sales spike in the first two months of the year.
PHOTO: SAM YEH, AFP
However, the company’s revenues declined by as much as 20 percent after the Lunar New Year holiday, before stabilizing somewhat last month after the company introduced three new products, Su said.
He said local consumers have a propensity to purchase point-and-shoot cameras as opposed to professional single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras in a ratio of 8:2 or 7:3.
In the domestic market, the camera replacement period is usually two to three years, with buyers favoring bigger screen sizes, higher megapixel counts and greater optical zoom capabilities, he added.
Canon has its bases covered in the point-and-shoot segment with its digital IXUS compact camera line, priced from NT$8,990 to NT$11,990 and offering capabilities of up to 14.7 megapixels, Su said.
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],”
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained
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