PANELMAKERS
AUO revenue down 4.6%
AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), the nation’s No. 2 LCD panelmaker, yesterday said revenue dropped 4.6 percent last month to NT$32.15 billion (US$1.02 billion), compared with NT$33.68 billion in December last year. However, shipments of PC and TV panels rose 2.7 percent to 9.6 million units last month from 9.35 million units in the prior month, it said. Shipments of small and medium-sized flat panels increased 5.6 percent month-on-month to 13.65 million. The results implied that price decline curtailed AUO’s revenue last quarter. The contraction in shipments matched AUO’s forecast last week. The company said last week that slow seasonal demand would lead to a high single-digit to low-teens percentage decline in shipments of its PC and TV panels. Prices will be flat, or fall slightly this quarter from last quarter, the company said.
TELECOMS
Chunghwa touts Toyota deal
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), Taiwan’s largest wireless carrier, said on Thursday it will make a greater push into a connected car project with Toyota as part of its fourth-generation (4G) service expansion. The partnership with the Japanese automaker began last year, providing tablet PCs with 4G connectivity for Toyota vehicles. It allows owners to check tire pressure and monitor images in their cars, even when they are not driving, said Lin Kuo-feng (林國豐), president of Chunghwa Telecom’s mobile business group. The two companies are expected to discuss integration of their back-end control systems to provide a wider range of 4G-enabled services and applications, Lin told reporters. As of the end of last year, Chunghwa Telecom had 1.33 million subscribers to its 4G mobile network — 38.6 percent of the nation’s 3.45 million 4G users — seven months after the launch of 4G operations in Taiwan.
MOBILE DEVICES
Xiaomi to release products
Xiaomi Corp (小米), China’s top smartphone maker by domestic shipments, said on Thursday that it will begin sales of its second-generation Redmi phone and Mi Pad tablet in Taiwan next week to expand its 4G offerings here. Online registration for the Redmi 2 opened at noon on Thursday and the mid-tier phone will be available on Thursday next week at a price of NT$3,799, the Beijing-based company said in a statement. The Mi Pad is to go on sale two days earlier at NT$6,999, with a limited amount of initial shipments, Xiaomi said.
COMPUTERS
Acer back on top in Canada
Acer Inc (宏碁) finished strongly in Canada’s PC market last year as the Taiwanese manufacturer regained the title of top laptop maker there in November and December. Acer captured more than 26 percent of the Canadian notebook market in each of the months, which the company on Thursday said was due to increased consumer purchasing during the holiday shopping season. The result also marked Acer’s highest notebook market share in Canada in the past 18 months, sending it back to the top among all laptop makers in Canada, the New Taipei-based company said. However, on a quarterly basis, Acer ranked only second in Canada’s laptop market for the fourth quarter in a row despite an 8.3 percent year-on-year growth in shipments. The company did not give its quarterly market share or rankings of other vendors for the October-December period.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the