Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥) yesterday said the ministry would provide smartphone vendor HTC Corp (宏達電) with assistance, if necessary, to deal with the litigation on patent infringement brought against it by Apple Inc.
Shih told lawmakers at a legislative session that the ministry has kept in close touch with HTC to keep informed of the progress of the litigation.
HTC said on Wednesday that shipments of HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE models to the US market have been delayed by a review of the US Customs requested by the US International Trade Commission (USITC).
INFRINGED
The customs review came after the USITC ruled in December last year that HTC infringed on one of Apple’s patents involving data detection.
HTC shares staged a mild technical rebound to close up 0.73 percent at NT$414 yesterday, following a decline of 6.59 percent in the previous session amid concerns that the shipment delay would impact its second-quarter sales.
SALES GROWTH
On April 24, HTC forecast its sales for the second quarter would reach NT$105 billion (US$3.55 billion), up 55 percent from the first quarter.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch said if the products are detained by the US Customs for four weeks, HTC’s sales for the second quarter will be reduced by 5 percent to 10 percent, while CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets said HTC’s share price will be under pressure in the near term as the market does not like uncertainty.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
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