Home-grown brands are seeing steady growth in the Asia-Pacific smartphone market, excluding Japan, at the expense of international brands, according to tech-tracking firm International Data Corp (IDC).
As part of a global trend, smartphones recently outshipped feature phones for the first time in the Asia-Pacific region, reaching 119 million units, or 53 percent of the total mobile phones shipped during the second quarter of the year, IDC said in a report on Thursday last week.
Aside from top-tier international brands or Chinese brands that also ship globally, such as Huawei Technologies Co Ltd (華為) and ZTE Corp (中興), there are also home-grown brands which, as a group, have seen a steady increase in their shipments and prominence, the report said.
This group of firms accounted for 38 percent of second-quarter smartphone shipments in the region, up from 20 percent a year earlier and 7 percent in the second quarter of 2011, the report said. By contrast, leading international brands Samsung Electronics Co and Apple Inc accounted for 24 percent and 6 percent respectively, while smaller international brands — including HTC Corp (宏達電), Nokia Oyj, Sony Corp, LG Electronics Co, BlackBerry Ltd and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc — took only a combined 9 percent share.
“In emerging markets like China and India, IDC has seen many local competitors spring up, but only in the last few quarters have we seen them aggressively scale up competitively on both price and hardware specs like bigger screens,” said Melissa Chau, a Singapore-based research manager with IDC.
“We are now hitting a place where there are smartphones for every price point, where the masses will benefit from the slew of players bringing in more options,” she said in the report.
These home-grown players compete with prices under US$200 or even under US$50, offering smartphones with adequate specifications, such as screens larger than 4 inches and dual-core processors, IDC said.
Many of them are not new players, but use the distribution networks they built while they were selling feature phones, the research firm said.
IDC also forecast that smartphone sales in emerging markets are set to balloon from 400 million units this year to 749 million units in 2017, driving future growth in the increasingly competitive industry.
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