South Korean electronics maker Samsung Electronics Co said yesterday it aimed to become the No. 1 touch phone brand in Taiwan by the end of the year.
The South Korean maker currently ranks second in the Taiwanese market.
“Globally, we are already the No. 1 touch phone manufacturer with a worldwide market share of 25 percent in the first quarter of this year,” said Ryu Jae-hyun, director of the company’s mobile marketing department in Taipei.
This market dominance translates into 6.1 million touch phones sold by Samsung worldwide in the first three months of the year, with total global sales reaching 24.5 million.
In Taiwan, the South Korean firm took 12 percent of the touch phone market — the same as its smartphone market share — in the first quarter, Ryu said.
Ryu said he believed the key to dominating the local market would be to introduce lower cost 2G models without data services to reach younger consumers with lower disposable income. He said the public could expect to see Samsung 2G touch phones below the NT$8,000 (US$245) mark.
Aside from offering competitively priced phones, Samsung said other market challenges included helping consumers overcome their “phobia” to touch phones, collaborating with more telecommunications operators, raising brand awareness and targeting different market segments by offering multiple Samsung touch phone models.
“In the third quarter you will see altogether nine models of touch phones by Samsung, with a few more additional ones coming out in the fourth quarter. So this year, we will be releasing more than 10 models just in Taiwan,” Ryu said.
Ryu said Samsung’s strengths lay in its seamless vertical integration and fast turnaround, which other firms would find hard to compete with.
He added that his company was betting heavily on touch phones, accounting for more than 30 percent of its mobile phone portfolio this year.
But Ryu admitted that he and his team did not reach their projected year-on-year growth for the second quarter, although the firm’s total handset volume sales grew 10 percent domestically from April through last month, outpacing the market which posted a decline of between 5 percent and 6 percent.
“Through the evolution of cellphones, we saw the focus shifting from camera, music, data-centric Internet, GPS [global positioning system], screen quality, applications, to touch. At Samsung, we believe our future lies in touch-based handsets,” Ryu 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],”
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
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