Tesco, the world’s third-biggest retailer, has entered Britain’s intensely competitive tablet market with a low-priced own-brand product that it hopes will boost online shopping and drive sales of its digital entertainment content.
The British firm on Monday said its “Hudl” device, which has a 7-inch screen, runs Google’s Android operating system and has 16 gigabytes of storage, would be priced at ￡119 (US$190), taking on a market dominated by Apple Inc, Samsung Electronics Co and Amazon.com Inc.
Tesco is attempting to revive its fortunes in its home market after losing share to rivals, but has suffered a series of setbacks to its reputation this year, including the discovery across Europe of horsemeat in products labeled as beef. In June the firm posted a drop in quarterly underlying sales in Britain, resuming a trend seen for most of the past three years and raising doubts about its ￡1 billion turnaround plan.
“It’s a reflection of the way Tesco is changing and also a reflection of the way the world around us is changing,” chief executive officer Phil Clarke told reporters at the Hudl launch.
The Hudl device has quick access to Tesco’s online shopping and banking sites, as well as its blinkbox movies and TV on demand service, Clubcard TV, music streaming and e-book services.
Tesco’s device will compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which retails for ￡99, Google’s Nexus 7, which costs ￡199 and Apple’s iPad mini, which sells for ￡269.
“If you compare the specification that we’ve put together with the specification of similarly priced products on the market we’ll beat them hands down,” Tesco chief information officer Mike McNamara said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
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