Spurred by iPhone sales, the nation’s smartphone market is expanding from a niche market into a mass one as it picks up momentum, posing a threat to netbook sales, IDC Taiwan analysts said yesterday.
“The promotion by telecom operators through subsidies and financing, along with the facilitation of a more mature ecosystem, has been the main engine behind the domestic smartphone market’s growth,” the market researcher’s telecommunications analyst John Cheng (鄭若望) told a media briefing.
The firm expects smartphone sales in Taiwan to climb by 78 percent to 1.6 million units this year from 900,000 last year, outperforming the overall mobile phone market’s meager 2.9 percent growth this year, Cheng said.
Cheng expects HTC Corp’s (宏達電) Android-powered smartphones to see the strongest growth along with better subsidies and application services by telecom operators in coming quarters to take up a 25 percent market share by the year’s end, up from 17 percent in the first quarter of this year.
Nokia, however, will remain the biggest smartphone brand in Taiwan with an anticipated market share of 30 percent by the year’s end, down from 41 percent in the first quarter, he said, adding that the feature phone-oriented vendor will be able to maintain its dominance in the smartphone market with a lower pricing strategy.
That will be matched by Apple Inc’s iPhone, whose market share is expected to jump to 30 percent by year’s end, up from 26 percent during the last quarter, following the recent launch of iPhone 4, he added.
“Telecom operators have come to the realization that their past promotion of iPhones hasn’t been as profitable as they imagined,” Cheng told the briefing yesterday.
The broader acceptance of smartphones has put the squeeze on netbook sales, whose growth momentum has gradually stabilized at a 20 percent market share in the domestic PC market, another analyst Dickie Chang (張祐菖) said.
Sales of netbooks by telecom operators declined by 34 percent year-on-year to total 32,866 units in the first quarter, while sales by retailers also quickly dropped by 42 percent to total at 82,309 units in the first quarter from a year earlier, IDC statistics showed.
“The requirement of a broader bandwidth at base stations for netbook users [to be able to surf the Internet] has forced telecom operators to [change their minds and instead] subsidize smartphone sales, which bring in further voice-based revenues,” Chang told yesterday’s media briefing.
Overall, IDC forecast the nation’s IT spending will experience a strong recovery this year to total 5.8 percent growth from last year.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS