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.
PRICE HIKES: The war in the Middle East would not significantly disrupt supply in the short term, but semiconductor companies are facing price surges for materials Taiwan’s semiconductor companies are not facing imminent supply disruptions of essential chemicals or raw materials due to the war in the Middle East, but surges in material costs loom large, industry association SEMI Taiwan said yesterday. The association’s comments came amid growing concerns that supplies of helium and other key raw materials used in semiconductor production could become a choke point after Qatar shut down its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production and helium output earlier this month due to the conflict. Qatar is the second-largest LNG supplier in the world and accounts for about 33 percent of global helium output. Helium is
DOMESTIC COMPONENT: Huang identified several Taiwanese partners to be a key part of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin supply chain, including Asustek, Hon Hai and Wistron Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), addressing crowds at the company’s biggest annual event, unveiled a variety of new products while predicting that its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) processors would help generate US$1 trillion in sales through next year. During a two-and-a-half-hour keynote address, Huang announced plans to push deeper into central processing units (CPUs) — Intel Corp’s home turf — and introduced semiconductors made with technology acquired from start-up Groq Inc. The company even said it was developing chips for data centers in outer space. At the heart of Huang’s speech was the message that demand for computing power
OPTIMISTIC: Inflation still has a chance of remaining below the central bank’s 2 percent alert level, as Taiwan’s economy is resilient with healthy exports, the NDC minister said Taiwan’s inflation could exceed 2 percent this year if oil prices continue to surge amid escalating tensions in the Middle East, prompting the government to reassess its economic outlook, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. DGBAS Minister Chen Shu-tzu (陳淑姿) told lawmakers at a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee that the agency’s earlier growth forecast of 1.68 percent in the consumer price index (CPI) and 7.71 percent for GDP this year did not account for the ongoing Middle East conflict and would need revision, if tensions persist. The previous forecast assumed an average international crude price of
ELECTRIC DREAMS: Smart cities would use ‘virtual power plants,’ which integrate idle electricity use from households, businesses and factories, Asustek said Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) yesterday showcased key components of its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven smart city initiatives at a trade show in Taipei, eyeing new business opportunities as cities develop sovereign AI infrastructure. Advances in generative, multimodal and physical AI are driving cities toward a new phase of “sovereign AI,” Asustek cochief executive officer Samson Hu (胡書賓) told reporters on the sidelines of the Smart City Summit and Expo at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center’s Hall 2. The company showcased its “AI City” framework, which comprises three layers — computing infrastructure centered on AI servers, AI models and a platform layer for data processing
RSS