HTC Corp (宏達電), the nation’s largest mobile-phone maker, is studying whether to equip phones with its own operating system, a move that may intensify competition with Google Inc and Microsoft Corp.
“We continue to assess, but that requires a few conditions to justify” having our own system, chief financial officer Cheng Hui-ming (鄭慧明) said yesterday.
The Taoyuan-based company’s own operating system would enable it to reduce its reliance on outside developers. HTC, which designs and produces phones using Google and Microsoft software, is among possible bidders for Palm Inc, three people familiar with the situation said this month.
“If you look at the successful smartphone players, like Apple and Research in Motion, a reason for their success is that they have their own platform,” said Steven Tseng (曾緒良), who rates HTC “buy” at RBS Asia Ltd in Taipei and favors the company having its own operating system in the long term. “The negative is the amount of resources they’d need to allocate.”
Cheng declined to comment on whether HTC has studied Palm for possible acquisition. HTC has no timeframe for deciding whether to have its own platform, he said.
“There are many multiple factors to be considered together, rather than a simple statement as to own or not to own” proprietary software, Cheng said.
HTC declined 1.4 percent to close at NT$389 in local trading yesterday.
Palm is working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer possibly as early as this week, according to the people familiar with the matter. They declined to be identified because a sale hasn’t been announced.
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