Taiwanese PC vendors will continue to have a hard time in the European personal computer market as it will take time to solve the eurozone’s debt problems, market research firm Gartner Inc said yestersday.
“There are a lot of solutions to the European debt crisis, but there is no immediate idea whether these solutions will succeed or consumer confidence will be restored,” said Tracy Tsai, principal research analyst at Gartner.
“It will call for certain actions, such as tighter government budgets, to make these solutions work,” she said.
“Even so, I do not believe consumer confidence will recover immediately,” she added
Tsai noted that Europe currently has a lower share of the global PC market, accounting for 30 percent in the second half of last year, compared with 33 percent to 34 percent in the past.
Taiwanese manufacturers Acer Inc (宏碁) and Asustek Computer Inc (華碩電腦) generated 50 percent of their revenue from the European market in the fourth quarter of 2010, but that figure dropped to about 40 percent in the third quarter last year after the sovereign debt problems hit, Tsai said.
PC shipments in Europe, including desktop and notebook computers, are projected to grow 2.4 percent year-on-year this year, much lower than the 9 percent forecast for Latin America, 10 percent for Asia and 15 percent to 20 percent for China.
“We remain conservative about the worldwide PC market in the first half of [this year], but we think the situation will improve in the second half of the year with the launch of the new CPU for Ultrabook laptops and Microsoft Corp’s Windows 8 software,” Tsai said.
According to International Data Corp. (IDC), the PC market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) continued to contract for the fourth consecutive quarter in the last quarter of last year, although the decline was not as steep as expected.
The market continued to be adversely affected by the debt crisis in the eurozone, which led to more cautious business investments, while consumers’ budgets continued to be dominated by the purchase of media tablets and smartphones, particularly in Western Europe, the IDC 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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts