SMARTPHONES
Red Rice sells out again
Chinese handset maker Xiaomi Corp’s (小米) Red Rice smartphones saw sizzling hot sales in Taiwan again on Monday, with 20,000 units sold out within a minute. In the fourth round of bulk online sales in Taiwan since its debut last year, the phone took only 54 seconds to sell out this time. A total of 48,000 units have been sold in Taiwan, according to the company. The low-cost model costs just NT$3,999 (US$135) in Taiwan, despite robust specifications that include a 1.5GHz quad-core processor from Taiwan’s MediaTek Inc (聯發科), a 4.7-inch screen with a pixel density of 312 pixels per inch and an 8-megapixel camera. In December, it took just 9 minutes and 50 seconds to sell all 10,000 smartphones on offer.
PC RANKINGS
Asustek No. 2 in Japan
Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) was ranked as the second-largest PC vendor in Japan last year, thanks to its tablet sales, according to data from the Tokyo-based research firm BCN Inc. BCN, which tracks retail sales of consumer items in Japan, found that Asustek held a 16.1 percent share of Japan’s PC market last year — including notebooks, desktops and tablets — second only to Apple Inc’s 19.1 percent. In third to fifth places were Japanese companies NEC Corp with a 15.9 percent share of the market, Toshiba Corp with 13.2 percent and Fujitsu Ltd with 12.2 percent.
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