Taiwan’s HTC Corp (宏達電) is no longer among the world’s top five smartphone vendors following a drop in sales last quarter, surpassed by Huawei Technologies Co (華為) of China and Sony Mobile Communications International AB of Japan, according to a US-based research firm.
Huawei jumped to the third spot with a 4.9 percent share of the market in the fourth quarter of last year, trailed by Sony Mobile with 4.5 percent and China’s ZTE Corp (中興) with a 4.3 percent market share, the International Data Corp (IDC) reported on Jan. 24.
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co remained the top player with a 29 percent market share, while second-placed Apple Inc extended its share to 21.8 percent thanks to record iPhone shipments in the fourth quarter of last year, IDC said.
The research firm did not disclose fourth-quarter figures for HTC, which ranked fifth with a 4 percent market share in the third quarter.
The worldwide smartphone market grew 36.4 percent from a year ago to 219.4 million units in the fourth quarter, which represented 45.5 percent of all mobile phone shipments, the highest percentage ever, IDC said.
“The high-growth smartphone market, though dominated by Samsung and Apple, still presents ample opportunities for challengers,” IDC’s senior research analyst Kevin Restivo said. “Vendors with unique market advantages, such as lower-cost devices, can rapidly gain market shares, especially in emerging markets.”
For last year as a whole, HTC was ranked as the world’s No. 4 smartphone producer, with shipments of 32.6 million units and a 4.6 percent market share, though both were down sharply from the 43.6 million units and 8.8 percent share in 2011, the report said.
Samsung and Apple retained their positions as the top two vendors, taking a 30.3 percent and a 19.1 percent share of the market respectively, with Finnish handset maker Nokia Oyj ranking third with a 4.9 percent market share, the report showed.
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