Apple Inc said it planned “greater investment” in China as chief executive officer Tim Cook visited Beijing and had “great meetings” with Chinese officials yesteryday.
“China is very important to us and we look forward to even greater investment and growth here,” Carolyn Wu, a Beijing-based spokeswoman, said by telephone, without providing further details.
Cook’s visit comes almost three months after crowds threw eggs at an Apple store in Beijing’s Sanlitun area when it did not open on the first day of sales for the iPhone 4S.
Apple, the world’s most valuable company, almost doubled its potential customer base for the iPhone this month when it signed a second carrier, China Telecom Corp (中國電信), in the world’s largest cellphone market.
China Telecom had 41.2 million subscribers last month on its 3G network that could use the iPhone to surf the Internet for games and videos. China Unicom Ltd (中國聯通), the nation’s first carrier to offer the iPhone, had 45.9 million 3G users.
The Cupertino, California-based company is waging a court battle for rights to the trademark for its iPad tablet computer in China with failed Hong Kong-listed display maker Proview International Holdings Ltd (唯冠國際). Apple has appealed a court ruling from November last year that its 2009 contract to buy the iPad name in China from Proview’s Taiwan unit was invalid because the mark was owned by Proview’s Shenzhen unit.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by