Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s No. 4 PC vendor, yesterday said it was unfazed by the new joint venture to be set up by rival Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) and contract manufacturing partner Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶), saying that “the industry has too much idle production capacity.”
“We are not worried because there are a lot of production facilities that are yet to be fully utilized,” Acer chief marketing officer Scott Lin (林顯郎) said.
Citing visits to Chinese facilities of contract partners such as Compal and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Lin said these production facilities outshone one another in size and contract makers had more capacity to digest amid slumps in notebook sales this year.
If those facilities were running at full steam, then Acer would be pressured, given that Compal might favor Lenovo because it was setting up a US$300 million manufacturing venture with the company, Lin told reporters yesterday on the sidelines of a product launch.
Compal and Lenovo on Tuesday announced their manufacturing venture in Hefei in China’s Anhui Province, which is slated for mass production at the end of next year to make Lenovo notebooks, all-in-one PCs and related components.
Lin also said that, as one firm was a contract maker and the other a brand-focused enterprise, it might cause some hiccups in the organizational integration process.
The rivalry between Acer and Lenovo intensified when Lenovo recently hired Acer’s former CEO Gianfranco Lanci as its “global consultant” to help expand global consumer business, with a primary focus on the integration of Medion AG, a German PC maker recently acquired by Lenovo.
However, Lin brushed off concerns that the move may jeopardize Acer’s operations, saying that a key executive must be fully empowered by the board to make a significant impact on the business.
“Acer’s board gave 100 percent power to Lanci in the past. We are not sure if that will be the case at Lenovo,” he 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