Smartphone rivals Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and LG Electronics Inc on Sunday unveiled their latest flagship devices, seeking to revive sales momentum and buck slowing industry growth.
Phone makers face another tough year this year as subdued global growth and persisting currency weakness in key emerging markets sap consumers’ spending power.
A push by Chinese manufacturers to expand overseas amid slowing growth in their domestic market may also undercut margins further.
In a bid to recapture market share, Samsung launched two new versions of its Galaxy S smartphones and brought in Facebook Inc chief executive Mark Zuckerberg for a surprise appearance to tout the potential of virtual reality, prompting hundreds of people to rush to the stage to record the moment.
LG, which lost money from its mobile business last year as its flagship products struggled, introduced a modular design to its new G5 smartphones that allows users to replace or upgrade functions such as camera and audio independently. It also launched a virtual reality headset and accessories including a drone controller to pair with the G5.
Analysts and investors cheered LG’s features, which they said were different enough to possibly revive sales, but were lukewarm about Samsung’s offerings, saying they only featured incremental upgrades.
“I think it’s possible for LG’s mobile business to recover on its new product launch, since they delivered significant changes with the G5,” Seoul-based HDC Asset Management fund manager Park Jung-hoon said. “The Galaxy S7, however, doesn’t seem to be creating as much buzz.”
Revamps could prove key to smartphone makers as this year shapes up to be another tough year.
Margin pressures are also expected to intensify for the industry as Chinese manufacturers seek to expand overseas to counter slowing domestic demand.
Samsung fell out of the top five in the world’s top smartphone market last year, but hopes that its easy-to-use payments service — Samsung Pay — will help it regain sales momentum.
“The challenge you have got in the smartphone market is breaking through all that sameness. From a design and functionality perspective, everything looks and feels the same,” Technalysis Research president Bob O’Donnell said. “So the challenge is finding things that stick out.”
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained