Shares of HTC Corp (宏達電), the world’s leading maker of smartphones running on the Windows Mobile and Android platforms, are likely to rise at least 36 percent over the next 12 months because its new product lineup could further increase market share and boost profits, Goldman Sachs said yesterday.
In a note to its clients yesterday, the US brokerage raised its target price for the stock to NT$1,000, which is NT$200 more than its previous estimate of NT$800 for HTC and represents a 36.61-percent upside from the stock’s closing price of NT$732 in Taipei trading yesterday.
The brokerage’s new target price on HTC compared with UBS’ NT$882, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s NT$830, Morgan Stanley’s NT$820, and NT$710 at BNP Paribas.
Goldman Sachs became the first foreign brokerage to raise the target price on HTC after the Taiwanese company unveiled two Android-based smartphones — HTC Desire HD and HTC Desire Z — in London on Wednesday, while chief executive officer Peter Chou (周永明) offered an optimistic outlook for the fourth quarter.
“We believe its new product portfolios will allow the company to maintain its technology leadership, sustain its value proposition and significantly raise its brand awareness in the competitive smartphone market for at least the next one to two years,” Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Chen (陳柏宇) said in the note.
Global market research firm Gartner has estimated global smartphone shipments will increase by 48.2 percent this year from last year and see another 46.9 percent growth next year on rising market demand.
Shipments of Android-based devices surpassed those of the iPhone in the second quarter, while HTC accounted for half of all Android devices shipped in the first quarter, BNP Paribas said on Monday.
Chen said he expected HTC to maintain robust growth in revenue in the fourth quarter and become a top-five global handset maker, given the company’s other new models are in the pipeline including a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) smartphone next month.
He said the planned introduction of the WP7 would not only allow HTC to become a tier-1 smartphone partner for the world’s major operators, but also pave the way for the company to further cooperate with US telecoms operator Verizon Wireless to present a new smartphone model next year based on 4G technology, known as Long Term Evolution (LTE).
Goldman Sachs, which maintained HTC on its “buy” list in Asia-Pacific coverage, forecast the company’s earnings per share to reach NT$47.55 this year, NT$74.47 next year and NT$91.53 in 2012 on expectations of higher shipments.
Shipments by HTC will reach 24.2 million units this year, up 107 percent from last year, BNP 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