Global handset sales rose 8.3 percent in the fourth quarter from the year-earlier period, with Samsung Electronics Co gaining 3 percentage points in market share last year, market researcher Gartner Inc said.
The top five vendors continued to lose sales to Apple Inc and others, with their combined market share falling to 75.3 percent from 79.7 percent, Gartner said in a statement on Tuesday. Nokia Oyj and Samsung retained their top two positions for the year.
“Samsung was the clear winner among the top five, as a result of improved channel relationships with distributors,” Carolina Milanesi, an Egham, England-based research director at Gartner, said in the statement.
Nokia’s full-year share slipped to 36.4 percent from 38.6 percent, while Samsung’s rose to 19.5 percent and LG Electronics Inc surpassed Motorola Inc in full-year market share to 10.1 percent. Motorola and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Ltd rounded out the top five. The share of other manufacturers, including unbranded Chinese phonemakers, advanced to 24.7 percent from 20.3 percent last year.
“Nokia will face a tough first half,” Milanesi said. “Its very strong mid-tier portfolio will help it hold market share, but its ongoing weakness at the high end will hurt its share of market value.”
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