Smartphone vendor HTC Corp (宏達電) yesterday said global shipments of its new flagship device, the HTC One, would double this month from last month, strengthening its belief that it could soon regain its lost market share following heavy marketing spending this year.
“The new HTC One attracted overwhelmingly positive feedback from nearly every market the company has explored since it was launched. Market demand is much better than expected,” HTC North Asia-Pacific Region president Jack Tong (董俊良) said in Taipei yesterday.
Tong made the comments while joining a pre-tour press conference arranged by US-based circus Cirque du Soleil, which is to stage Michael Jackson The Immortal at Taipei Arena from June 28 to June 30.
Tong said the HTC One, the company’s newest Android-based smartphone, which it hopes will improve its fortunes in the competitive smartphone market, is a product designed to meet consumers’ needs, especially regarding audio and photographic quality.
As the activation rates of the phone has been growing steadily every week, sales of the HTC One are “very likely” to surpass that of the HTC Butterfly — another 5-inch Android smartphone seeing strong demand in Japan, the US and Taiwan — sometime this quarter, he added.
To promote the HTC One, the company this year invited popular Taiwanese rock band Mayday (五月天) and singer Wang Lee-hom (王力宏) to be product spokespersons. The collaboration with Cirque du Soleil also reflects the Taoyuan-based company’s new marketing strategy after losing ground to South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc.
“HTC understands the importance of communication with consumers and the company will continue efforts to effectively market its products and brand this year,” Tong said.
Meanwhile, Samsung yesterday announced that renowned Taiwanese talk show hostess Dee Hsu (徐熙娣), better known as Little S (小S), and Golden Horse Award-winning actor Ethan Ruan (阮經天) are to be Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone spokespersons this year.
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