Smartphone maker HTC Corp (宏達電) yesterday reported that sales last month fell 19.87 percent from a year earlier and that accumulated sales in the first four months of the year dropped 30.84 percent from the year before amid fierce competition from Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, a company release said.
On a monthly basis, last month’s sales edged up 0.49 percent to NT$31.03 billion (US$1.06 billion) compared with NT$30.88 billion in March, helped in part by the launch of the company’s new One series smartphone products.
During the January-April period, revenue totaled NT$98.82 billion, down from NT$142.89 billion in the same period last year, the release showed.
HTC shares dropped 4.35 percent to close at NT$452 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
While HTC remained the second-highest priced share on the local bourse after Largan Precision Co (大立光), yesterday’s decline was bigger than the 2.11 percent fall of the benchmark TAIEX, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Largan, the nation’s leading maker of handset lenses, edged down 0.62 percent to NT$477 yesterday.
Taoyuan-based HTC is counting on the success of its One series models to help narrow its gap with market leaders such as Apple and Samsung, especially after the launch of Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S3 smartphone on Friday last week in London and the widely anticipated introduction of Apple’s iPhone5, likely sometime in the second half of the year.
Samsung led the global smartphone market in the first quarter of the year, with shipments of 42.2 million units and a market share of 29.1 percent, according to the latest IDC quarterly report released on Tuesday last week.
Apple was the runner-up, with shipments of 35.1 million units and a market share of 24.2 percent, while HTC ranked fifth, with shipments of 6.9 million units and a market share of 4.8 percent, IDC said.
Samsung’s “aggressive marketing campaign, software/user interface additions that enhance the user experience and wider distribution should solidify its position in the high-end smartphone segment,” Morgan Stanley analyst Jasmine Lu (呂智穎) wrote in a report last week.
Lu said it would be difficult for HTC to compete with Samsung in terms of marketing, distribution and operator coverage, especially in such markets as Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
On April 24, HTC told an investors’ conference in Taipei that revenue would continue to decline in the second quarter, citing intensified competition with Apple and Samsung.
HTC said second-quarter revenue would reach about NT$105 billion, compared with NT$67.79 billion in the first quarter and NT$124.40 billion a year earlier.
Morgan Stanley said it expected HTC to meet its second-quarter guidance, with more than 10 million units being shipped in the quarter.
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
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],”
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
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