Two HTC executives resign
HTC Corp (宏達電) chief marketing officer Ben Ho (何永生) and president of engineering and operations Fred Liu (劉慶東) have resigned from the Taiwanese smartphone maker, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Ho tendered his resignation to chairwoman Cher Wang (王雪紅) and will leave by the end of this year, while Liu retired after 16 years, the people said.
Wang, who founded the company in 1997, has taken over the role of chief marketing officer.
The resignations come on the heels of the departure of Paul Golden, a former executive of Samsung Electronics Co, who left HTC earlier this year when his short-term contract as a marketing consulting expired, the sources said.
Notebook shipments stable
Morgan Stanley has maintained its projection of 5 percent quarterly growth for worldwide notebook computer shipments for this quarter, after the market rebounded to show marginal growth in the second quarter.
The brokerage expects notebook shipments from the top five original design manufacturers — Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶), Wistron Corp (緯創), Pegatron Corp (和碩) and Inventec Corp (英業達) — to be about 36 million units, compared with 34.4 million units shipped in the April-to-June period.
R&D spending grows
Research and development (R&D) spending increased for the 11th straight year to US$27.47 billion in 2012, accounting for 3.1 percent of the nation’s GDP, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
Up to 74.2 percent of the amount was used for product research and development in the private sector, especially by firms making PCs, electronics and optical products, the ministry said.
The expense figure represents 4.9 percent growth from a year ago, whereas China’s R&D spending increased 18.5 percent and South Korea’s expanded 12 percent in 2012, the ministry said, citing studies conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Mazda eyes 5% market share
Mazda Motor Taiwan yesterday said it aims to increase its share of the domestic market share from the current 3.5 percent to 5 percent by 2018, after Mazda Motor Corp opened a local branch on July 1.
“We’d like the new branch to both enhance the brand image and strengthen the strong ties with our customers here,” the company said in a statement.
Bank heading to Cambodia
The Financial Supervisory Commission yesterday approved plans by Taiwan Cooperative Bank (合庫銀行) to set up two sub-branches in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
The expansion plans came as an increasing number of Taiwanese companies invest in the nation and the political situations has stabilized, the commission said.
First Commercial Bank (第一銀行), E.Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行), Mega Bank International Commercial Bank (兆豐銀行) and Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) already have a presence in the Southeast Asian nation.
UMC can use SONOS
Cypress Semiconductor Corp, a US-based provider of embedded nonvolatile memory solutions, said on Monday that it had licensed its silicon oxide nitride oxide silicon (SONOS) embedded Flash memory intellectual property to United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) for the 55-nanometer process technology node.
The two companies said in a joint statement that the SONOS technology is ready for future application development including wearable devices, Internet of Things applications, microcontrollers and logic-dominated products.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by