The nation is among the top five markets for Google Inc’s app store by revenue, helped by the public’s increasing use of smartphones, Google said yesterday.
Google vice president of engineering and Google Play in Asia-Pacific head Chris Yerga told a news conference in Taipei that three of the top five Google Play markets are in Asia — Taiwan, Japan and South Korea — and that the US is also among the five.
He declined to name the fifth market or give the specific rankings of the top five, saying only that the figures were not for public consumption.
It was not a surprise to see three Asian markets in the top-five list given the high smartphone penetration rates in these countries, which in turn leads to strong demand for mobile games, Yerga said.
Launched in 2012 as the official app store for Google’s Android operating system, Google Play now has more than 1 million free and paying apps and over 50 billion downloads. It also offers music, games, magazines, books, movies and television programs.
Google Play’s game services received 100 million new users between January and June last year, making it the fastest-growing mobile gaming network ever, according to Google.
A poll released in December last year by the Institute for Information Industry (資策會) found that 13.55 million Taiwanese aged over 12 owned a smartphone by the second half of last year, representing 65.4 percent of Taiwanese in that demographic.
That was up from a smartphone penetration rate of 58.7 percent during the first half of last year, the survey said.
The number of Taiwanese working in the US rose to a record high of 137,000 last year, driven largely by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) rapid overseas expansion, according to government data released yesterday. A total of 666,000 Taiwanese nationals were employed abroad last year, an increase of 45,000 from 2023 and the highest level since the COVID-19 pandemic, data from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) showed. Overseas employment had steadily increased between 2009 and 2019, peaking at 739,000, before plunging to 319,000 in 2021 amid US-China trade tensions, global supply chain shifts, reshoring by Taiwanese companies and
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) received about NT$147 billion (US$4.71 billion) in subsidies from the US, Japanese, German and Chinese governments over the past two years for its global expansion. Financial data compiled by the world’s largest contract chipmaker showed the company secured NT$4.77 billion in subsidies from the governments in the third quarter, bringing the total for the first three quarters of the year to about NT$71.9 billion. Along with the NT$75.16 billion in financial aid TSMC received last year, the chipmaker obtained NT$147 billion in subsidies in almost two years, the data showed. The subsidies received by its subsidiaries —
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