Several research institutes have expressed optimism over this year’s prospects for the information technology and telecoms market, including the global cellphone, cloud-computing products and value-added services.
Global shipments of cellphones are expected to grow 12 percent to 1.33 billion units this year, with shipments of smartphones forecast to grow by 30 percent to 235 million units, a forecast made last month by Topology Research Institute (TRI) showed.
TRI researcher Chen Wei-hang (陳緯航) said that emerging markets, particularly China and India, would be the main pillars of growth in shipments.
Chen said the Asia-Pacific region would be the fastest-growing market for cellphones this year and would become a major target for the marketing of lower-level cellphones.
Anticipated 3G handset replacement purchases in cities on China’s southeastern coast, and strong demand from farm villages for extra-low-price models, will help bolster the growth of the market, Chen said.
India, meanwhile, is entering a stage of high-speed expansion. The number of cellphone users is expected to continue growing, following the completion of a number of telecommunication infrastructure projects in second and third-tier cities, Chen said.
In Taiwan, as the market for cellphone users has reached saturation, local telecoms companies are looking to value-added sales in both the domestic and Chinese markets, such as providing e-books for cellphones, as well as low-price smartphones.
In addition, another local market research firm forecast that this year will be a key year for cloud computing, which is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet, as IT service companies are expected to tap cloud technologies to deliver new value-added services to the market such as e-books, e-medical records and e-commerce.
Gartner, an IT research and advisory firm headquartered in Connecticut, forecast in November that revenue from cloud computing would top US$14 billion annually by the end of 2013.
Since Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer proposed “Three Screens and a Cloud,” a concept that envisions connecting PCs, handsets and TVs to the Internet, during a visit to Taiwan last October, cloud computing has become a hot issue locally.
Microsoft then signed pacts with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) in the following month to collaborate on expanding the cloud computing business.
Google and IBM have also said they would develop new services and products based on cloud computing technology.
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