Shipments of Taiwan’s small and medium-sized flat panels for the third quarter are expected to rise 13.7 percent from a year earlier on the back of strong global demand for tablet computers and smartphones, a local industrial organization said on Saturday.
The Photonics Industry and Technology Development Association (PIDA) said shipments of Taiwanese-made small and medium-sized (under 10 inches) flat screens are expected to exceed 500 million units in the third quarter.
In the first quarter, Taiwan’s shipments of the panels totaled 354.6 million units, up 0.9 percent from a year ago, according to the statistics compiled by the PIDA.
The PIDA is a nonprofit industrial group organized by the government and the private sector to develop the local optoelectronics industry in a bid to boost Taiwan’s global competitiveness.
The organization said that as tablet computers and smartphones continue becoming more popular, shipments of small and medium-sized screens are expected to grow from quarter to quarter this year.
The group said the global smartphone market has bifurcated into two submarkets, one for high-priced models and the other for budget models.
As a result, some heavyweight vendors such as Samsung Electronics Co of South Korea, HTC Corp (宏達電) of Taiwan and Nokia Corp of Finland, have refocused their development efforts from the high-end to the low-end market to cater to emerging markets, it added.
The PIDA said it expects smartphones priced below NT$10,000 (US$334) will account for 35 percent of total global smartphone market sales this year, with the portion likely to rise to more than 50 percent in 2014. The group said low-end smartphones will feature a screen of between 3.2 inches and 3.7 inches, while more product developers will adopt one-glass solutions for their touch screens.
For the high-end market, screens will enlarge to more than 4 inches with active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) screens and in-cell technology in focus, it said.
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