German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday said the IT industry was one of the key potential sources for growth in the crisis-hit eurozone, as she opened the world’s biggest high-tech fair.
Formally inaugurating the CeBIT fair, Merkel said that while “a lot” had been done to stabilize the euro, “we still talk about creating growth without really having an answer as to where this growth is going to come from.”
“The IT industry is without doubt one of the possibilities and one of my dreams ... is to create the same founding conditions for all small IT companies everywhere in Europe,” she said.
Photo: Reuters
Hours earlier, Germany’s IT industry lobby BITKOM forecast sales growth this year to rise by 1.4 percent to 153.3 billion euros (US$200 billion), driven by a solid market in smartphones and tablet computers.
While a slight drop from the 2.2 percent seen last year, the forecast is still considerably higher than the 0.4 percent total overall growth for the German economy, the largest in Europe, BITKOM president Dieter Kempf said.
Sales of tablet computers in Germany were expected to rise by 11 percent to 2.3 billion euros, the lobby forecast.
“Sales of tablets should for the first time show the same sales levels as desktop PCs,” Kempf said.
The BITKOM figures also showed a near-complete transformation from standard mobile phones to smartphones in the past four years.
In 2009, smartphones accounted for just 17 percent of phones sold and 34 percent of the turnover.
By the end of this year, they were expected to account for 81 percent of units sold and 96 percent of the sales in the 8.8 billion euro German market.
Global IT spending was expected to rise this year by 5.1 percent to 2.7 trillion euros, BITKOM forecast, with India (13.9 percent), Brazil (9.6 percent) and China (8.9 percent) the biggest growth markets.
“There is a shift in the 2013 country ranking: China has overtaken Japan and is for the first time the second-biggest national market,” Kempf said.
China holds 9.5 percent of the global IT market, now ahead of Japan with 8.3 percent. Both Asian giants are still comfortably behind the US, which enjoys a 26.8 percent share of the world’s technology market.
About 4,100 exhibitors from about 70 countries are expected in Hanover, Germany, for the CeBIT fair, including tech giants Microsoft, SAP, IBM and Google.
This year’s theme is “shareconomy,” the increasing trend of users sharing data and things, with examples being car sharing and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
CeBIT was to open its door formally yesterday, with a host of head-spinning and innovative gadgets awaiting the tens of thousands expected to stream through the hangar-like halls.
This year’s hits include a “3D printer” that creates objects from a computer read-out, a chair for couch potatoes that turns into a rowing machine if you get too fat and a “smart” shopping trolley that does the supermarket run for you.
Also likely to draw attention is a 3D display allowing users to scroll through precious medieval books with just a wave of the hand, tomes that are normally banished behind a glass case or touchable only with white gloves.
CeBIT runs until Saturday.
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained