Microsoft Corp has delayed the launch of its Xbox One game console in China, which had been set for release tomorrow, but the world’s biggest software company said it would be released by the end of the year.
The delay is the latest in a series of setbacks for Microsoft in China, where it is under investigation for suspected anti-trust violations related to the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office.
The Chinese government lifted a 2000 ban on gaming consoles earlier this year.
Microsoft had reached a deal with Chinese internet TV set-top box maker BesTV New Media Co Ltd (博達克諮詢) to form a joint venture to manufacture the consoles in Shanghai’s Free-trade Zone a year ago.
The Xbox One console will cost 3,699 yuan (US$602) without the Kinect motion detection system and 4,299 yuan with Kinect, Microsoft said in July.
China is the world’s third-biggest gaming market, where revenues grew by more than a third from 2012 to nearly US$14 billion last year.
However, piracy and the dominance of PC and mobile gaming may leave little room for legitimate console and game sales.
In May, Sony Corp said it would set up a joint venture with Shanghai Oriental Pearl Group Co (東方明珠) to bring the PlayStation games console to China.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS