Morgan Stanley said that reduced demand from developed and emerging markets has triggered a cut in its global smartphone growth estimates for this year and next year.
As a result, the US brokerage is cutting its forecasts for this year’s smartphone shipments by 3.1 percent to 1.46 billion units and for next year by 6.3 percent to 1.61 billion units, it said in a research note dated Aug. 13.
The new estimates for smartphone shipments suggest a 10.4 percent year-on-year growth next year, compared with an increase of 28 to 76 percent over the past five years.
Morgan Stanley has also lowered China’s smartphone shipment projections for next year by 1.4 percent to 433 million units, or up 2 percent year-on-year, following a previous estimated growth of only 1 percent for 2015.
“We expect the combination of high penetration in developed markets and China after the big refresh cycle, currency fluctuations that weakened purchasing power in emerging markets and limited differentiation among Android lookalikes to shorten replacement demand,” said Jasmine Lu (呂智穎), a Taipei-based analyst with Morgan Stanley.
She said stagnant volume growth and intensifying competition have boded ill for the smartphone pricing trend, as the global smartphone average selling price was US$289 in the second quarter of this year, relatively flat from the same period a year ago.
Excluding Apple Inc’s iPhones, the average selling price for Android-based smartphones was down 15 percent year-on-year in the April-June quarter, which could decline further in 2016 due to slower-than-expected upgrades in hardware specifications, Lu said.
As a result, Lu suggested that investors should avoid Android-based handset OEMs, including TCL Communication, Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) and Taiwan’s HTC Corp (宏達電), and component suppliers who are likely to suffer from greater margin pressure, such as Sunny Optical and Sunlord.
In the greater China smartphone supply chain, the analyst said, her top picks are Hong Kong-listed AAC Technologies Holdings Inc (瑞聲科技) and Taiwan’s Catcher Technology Co (可成), a metal casing supplier to Apple, on their share gains in the market.
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
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],”
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Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day