MStar Semiconductor Inc (晨星半導體), the world’s biggest chipmaker for LCD televisions, said its products had been adopted by Toshiba Corp in its new TV series for European markets as the Taiwanese company aims to further strengthen its foothold in the TV chip business.
In a statement released on Monday, MStar said its chips would be used in the Japanese electronics giant’s TL and RL TV series to enable users to merge broadcast TV networks and broadband content through HbbTV technology.
HbbTV, which stands for hybrid broadcast broadband television, is a major new pan-European initiative aimed at improving the delivery of broadcast and broadband content to users through connected TVs and set-top boxes.
The Taiwanese company said it was the first HbbTV solution provider in the TV system-on-chip (SoC) industry to work with Toshiba to launch the main EU platform, the statement said.
At a time when US chipmakers Intel Corp and Broadcom Corp are slowly withdrawing from the television chip market and redirecting their focus on the more profitable mobile phone chips used in smartphones and tablets, MStar and its Taiwanese peer, MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the nation’s biggest mobile phone chip designer, have secured more than half of the global TV chip -business during the first half of the year, the latest IHS iSuppli report said last month.
In iSuppli’s Digital TV & Set-Top Box Market Tracker report released on Oct. 28, MStar enjoyed a market share of 39 percent in the global TV SoC chip sector in the first six months, followed by MediaTek’s 12 percent and 6 percent for the US-based Trident Microsystems Inc, one of the world’s leading set-box chip suppliers.
Toshiba, Sony Corp and Samsung Electronics Co — which make TV SoC chips to supply their own internally produced televisions as one group — collectively enjoyed almost a 27 percent share in the first half of the year, while independent silicon providers, including Zoran Corp, accounted for a 14 percent share, with a scant 2 percent share for Intel and others, the report said.
Shares in MStar were -unchanged at NT$176 and MediaTek fell 1.87 percent to NT$315 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday, compared with a 0.46 percent decline on the benchmark TAIEX.
However, smaller chip designer Silicon Integrated Systems Corp (矽統) saw its share price rise 4.5 percent to NT$11.60 thanks to the company’s share buyback plan announced a day earlier.
Silicon Integrated said on Monday in an exchange filing that it planned to repurchase a total of 30 million shares on the open market at a price of between NT$7.7 and NT$18.06 from yesterday to Jan. 14.
In August, Silicon Integrated — which has increased its focus on Internet TVs and touch panel solutions from PC products — bought back 26.11 million of its shares in a bid to increase earnings per share for shareholders and therefore help boost share prices.
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
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