Acer Inc (宏碁) yesterday said it would continue to work with Chinese partners to expand its presence in the market, a day after the PC vendor abruptly canceled a press conference in which it was expected to launch a new smartphone running on an operating system developed by Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group (阿里巴巴).
The incident cast doubts on Acer’s plan to rebuild its presence in the Chinese smartphone market. China is expected to overtake the US as the world’s biggest smartphone market, accounting for 26.5 percent of global shipments this year, bolstered by demand for smartphones priced under US$100, market researcher International Data Corp said last month.
Acer did not elaborate on why it canceled the event, but Alibaba said Google Inc was behind the move.
The Chinese company said Acer was under pressure from Google to halt the press conference, the Chinese-language Economics Daily News reported yesterday, citing a statement from Alibaba.
Alibaba said Google had threatened to withdraw Acer’s Android license if the Taiwanese firm used Alibaba’s rival operating system on its phones, the report said.
Acer was scheduled to launch a new high-end smartphone, code-named the A800, but canceled the event about half an hour before it was scheduled to start because of “internal factors,” Acer’s China public relations company said.
The A800 was expected to be Acer’s first smartphone running Alibaba’s latest operating system, Aliyun OS 2.0, a system that is primarily built to run Web-based applications that are stored on remote servers, the report said.
The launch would have made Acer the third company to adopt the Aliyun operating system after Chinese firms Beijing Tianyu Telecommunications Equipment Co (天宇朗通) and Haier Group (海爾).
Acer was planning to unveil two smartphones powered by Aliyun, the report said.
Acer yesterday declined to comment on the report. In a statement sent to reporters yesterday, the firm apologized for the “abrupt cancelation of yesterday’s press conference with Alibaba in China.”
Acer said it would continue to work “with strategic partners in China to create better product and service offerings, and looks forward to sharing the results of our win-win developments in the near future.”
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