Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) yesterday said it expects to ship more smartphones this month after selling about 105,000 ZenFones in May and more than 200,000 units last month.
With the ZenFone 5 ranked as the bestselling smartphone locally for two consecutive months, the company hopes the wider ZenFone range “will remain the bestseller in July,” following the launch of its first 4G long-term evolution (LTE) handset, Asustek’s corporate vice president Benson Lin (林宗樑) said.
The world’s fifth-largest PC vendor yesterday introduced the ZenFone 5 LTE, as the company pursues larger market share amid consumers’ migration to 4G networks.
The ZenFone 5 LTE has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 1.2GHz quad-core processor and costs NT$6,990 (US$233) for a 16GB model, undercutting models with similar specifications from competitors, such as Sony Corp’s Xperia M2 at NT$9,900, and HTC Corp’s (宏達電) Desire 610 at NT$7,990.
The company also revealed the PadFone S LTE version. The 5-inch smartphone starts from NT$9,999 and supports wireless charging.
Lin said the company’s previously reported supply issue has been resolved and Taiwanese consumers can receive their new smartphones within a day if they order online.
The company had a local smartphone market share of between 14 and 16 percent in May and became the largest smartphone brand in the local market last month, Lin said.
Chief executive officer Jerry Shen (沈振來) said Asustek has targeted China’s Xiaomi Corp (小米) as its main competitor in the budget smartphone segment and is confident about its own competitiveness, as Asus smartphones are well received in Southeast Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia.
Asustek in May told investors that it expected to sell 5 million to 10 million smartphones this year.
Separately, Sony Mobile Communications AB said yesterday it plans to take a step-by-step approach rather than launch a global campaign to boost its global market share at the expense of bigger rivals Samsung Electronics Co and Apple Inc.
Kaz Tajima, senior vice president and head of UX Creative Design and Planning at Sony Mobile, said the Japanese handset maker needs to challenge “two giants” in the global smartphone market, referring to Samsung and Apple.
“At Sony, we have a kind of market-by-market approach. If we try to fight those two giants everywhere, it’s impossible,” Tajima told a press briefing in Taipei.
“But as a challenger, we pinpoint the market, identify the market and take a two-digit share ... stealing share from those two giants,” he said.
Sony Mobile has successfully applied that strategy to become one of the top three players in Japan, and the company has also been ranked among the top three smartphone vendors in Taiwan, Tajima said.
There are now almost 10 markets globally where Sony has achieved a market share of more than 10 percent, including Spain, Russia, Sweden, Hong Kong and India, he said.
“So we would like to increase that kind of market one by one — not having a full fight, one-by-one approach — to achieve this performance,” Tajima 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
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
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],”
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