Morgan Stanley has forecast that the revenues of the nation’s 4G operators will drop in the coming months, amid fierce competition among the four main players to attract 4G subscribers.
Two months after Taiwan launched 4G services, the revenues from that service at the nation’s top three operators — Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大) and Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (遠傳電信) — were flat year-on-year last month, the US brokerage firm said.
The carriers’ average revenue growth last month also remained flat, according to Morgan Stanley’s data.
It showed that the growth of their revenues from data services slowed to 18.2 percent year-on-year, compared with 19.3 percent in July, the brokerage said.
Their year-on-year revenue growth from data services in the first and second quarters of the year was 23.5 percent and 21.2 percent respectively, it said.
“With operators introducing more aggressive promotions in September after Taiwan Star Telecom Corp’s (台灣之星) 4G launch late last month, we expect mobile revenue and average revenue per user trends to worsen in coming months,” Hong Kong-based Morgan Stanley analyst Gary Yu wrote in a research note on Thursday last week.
Privately held Taiwan Star Telecom launched 4G services on Aug. 25 with unlimited 4G data plans starting at NT$599 (US$20) per month, in an effort to entice Taiwanese consumers to shift from 3G to 4G services.
In response to Taiwan Star Telecom’s low-cost 4G plans, the other companies began a second round of 4G promotions on Aug. 28, with Chunghwa Telecom — the largest mobile operator in Taiwan — offering unlimited 4G data plans starting at NT$1,136 per month.
The other two major 4G operators, Far EasTone and Taiwan Mobile, also introduced similar plans, starting from NT$1,399, in a bid to increase their share of the local 4G market, which is estimated to reach 1 million subscribers by the end of the year, according to market analysts.
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