ARM Holdings PLC, the UK designer of chips used in most Android-based tablet devices, yesterday said shipments of ARM-based chips would accumulate to 100 billion units by 2020, as it is expanding faster to new businesses such as Internet-enabled televisions.
“ARM is growing into new markets and product categories with stronger growth momentum. Mobile phone chips will still be our core business, but the growth rate will be stable,” said Philip Lu (呂鴻祥), president of ARM’s Taiwan branch, during a media briefing.
“And we believe microcontrollers and chips used in home appliances will be the area with potential growth,” Lu said.
Growth in shipments of ARM’s digital TVs and set-top expanded 60 percent last year from a year ago, Lu said.
Last year, overall shipments of ARM-based chips spiked 55 percent to 6.1 billion units, which helped drive up revenues 46 -percent, he said. Mobile phone chip sales made up the biggest portion of ARM’s revenues.
Tom Wang (王建元), a marketing manager at ARM’s home product division in Taipei, said the world’s top five TV manufacturers, including Samsung Electronics, have engaged with ARM, which would help his company boost its market share in the digital TV market to 56 percent in 2013, from 32 percent last year.
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],”
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
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