Taiwanese suppliers in the technology industry are likely to benefit from the launch of more large-screen smartphones, UBS Securities said yesterday.
UBS Securities Taipei branch equities and research head William Dong (董成康) described last year as a less exciting year for Taiwan’s tech industry due to a lack of amazing new smartphones, but said the situation would change in the third quarter of this year when major brands are set to launch new products.
“Getting bigger will contribute greatly to the tech industry, including Taiwanese component suppliers and assemblers, given that large-sized smartphones remain the mainstream in the market,” he said at a media briefing.
On stocks relating to PCs, UBS predicted negative growth for the sector this year, but added that the range of the decline would be smaller than that of last year because of a lower comparison base, he said.
On the outlook for wearable computing devices, Dong said the devices were still in the initial stage of development and wold need more fashion factors added to their design.
In the third quarter of last year, shipments of “phablets” — smartphones with a screen size of 5 to 7 inches — accounted for 21 percent of the 261.1 million smartphones shipped globally, up from only 3 percent in the same period of 2012, research marketer IDC said.
Apple, whose latest iPhone 5S has a 4-inch screen, saw its iOS handsets grow 25.6 percent year-on-year during the third quarter of last year, underperforming Google Android’s 51.3 percent growth and Microsoft Windows’ 156 percent, IDC said.
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