Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) on Saturday said it is ready to make a push into the mainstream smartphone market this year with its low-cost ZenFone range, which is gaining traction among consumers worldwide.
Asustek chairman Jonney Shih (施崇棠) said that after the launch of the first-generation ZenFone in January last year, this year will be the year the company plays a bigger role in the worldwide smartphone market.
Earlier this month, Asustek unveiled its new ZenFone Zoom at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, displaying an Android smartphone with an optical zoom camera.
The firm also introduced the second-generation low-cost ZenFone range, dubbed the ZenFone 2, which is set to go on sale in March at US$199, while the ZenFone Zoom is to be available in the second quarter at US$399.
“The ZenFone gave us a chance to play in the minor league, and now we are ready to challenge the major league,” Shih said at the PC maker’s annual year end banquet, or wei ya (尾牙), for employees on Saturday.
In November last year, Asustek CEO Jerry Shen (沈振來) estimated the company’s smartphone shipments for last year were 8 million units, and forecast shipments of 16 million units for this year.
Shen said the company plans to expand the availability of its ZenFones from 14 markets last year to about 20 markets this year, concentrating more on China and Japan. The firm’s smartphone business is expected to turn profitable this year, comprising about 15 percent of total revenue, he added.
Asustek is scheduled to report its earnings results for last quarter on Feb. 13 when it will outline its business outlook for this year.
Investors are cautious about the firm’s foreign exchange risks in emerging markets, potential smartphone profitability and growth prospects for desktop and motherboard businesses this year.
“While we believe Asustek’s smartphone shipments will continue to grow in 2015, we have concerns over profitability, as competition from Chinese companies like Xiaomi [小米] in emerging markets is growing and there is potential for a cut to Intel’s smartphone CPU subsidy and promotional support,” Barclays Bank wrote in a client note on Thursday last week. “Potential Russia and emerging market demand slowdown from currency weakness is also a concern.”
Asustek on Saturday also hinted that its next smartwatch might come with a battery life of up to seven days, thanks to the adoption of simplified chipset and mobile operating system designs.
“The ZenWatch is defined by us as a companion to a smartphone, and we think it still has a lot of room for improvement,” Shih said. “As a companion device, its central processing unit and operating system should be more simplified than the current version, so that I can use it for up to seven days on one charge, rather than for just two days.”
Asustek’s first smartwatch, dubbed ZenWatch, was launched just before the IFA electronics trade show in Germany in early September last year. The smartwatch has a battery life of up to two days.
At the launch of the first ZenWatch, priced from NT$5,990 (US$192), in Taiwan on Dec. 24 last year, Shen let slip that Asustek was planning a second-generation ZenWatch for the third quarter of this year, and that the upgraded device would offer a new level of independence from smartphones by allowing voice calls without being tethered to a handset.
The company also intends to unveil two other “wristband-like” devices at a lower price, with health management features such as the ability to measure footsteps, heartbeat, pulse and blood sugar, Shen said, without elaborating on a timetable.
Additional reporting by Kevin Chen
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS