Acer Inc (宏碁) will continue to produce netbook PCs, although rival Samsung Electronics Co reportedly plans to quit the market early next year, a top Acer executive said yesterday.
On Nov. 25, French Web site Blogeee quoted an e-mail sent by Samsung to its trading partners, saying that the South Korean company would discontinue its 10.1-inch netbook product range in the first quarter of next year following the introduction of a new strategy for the coming year.
The company will focus on -ultra-portable products in the 11.6-inch to 12-inch size range, as well as Intel Corp’s ultrabooks.
However, Acer Taiwan president Scott Lin (林顯郎) said the company would hold on to its netbook business because of demand from emerging markets.
“There is still demand for netbooks in developing countries such as Indonesia and India, where netbooks have become critical tools among students for information education,” Lin said. “Acer will absolutely keep making netbooks, and we expect that Intel will release the next version of its netbook CPU as early as February next year.”
“Some brands might decide to quit the business because they lack economic scale, so the future netbook market is expected to be led by two major players — Acer and Asustek Computer Inc (華碩),” he said.
Sales of netbooks accounted for between 18 percent and 20 percent of Acer’s total notebook shipments for the first three quarters of this year, higher than the industry average which is between 11 percent and 12 percent, Lin said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
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