E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技), which supplies e-paper displays for Rakuten Kobo Inc’s e-reader series, expects shipments of its “smart” tags to grow as fast as 30 percent annually next year, as more US and Chinese retailers are to use its e-tags for shelf labels.
E-paper displays used in e-tags for luggage and retailers shelf labels are to become the company’s growth drivers in the next few years, as E Ink is exiting the LCD market and needs a new source of revenue, it said.
From next year, all revenue is expected to come from e-paper displays, with 70 percent used in e-readers and 30 percent used in e-tags, wearable devices, mobile phones and digital signage, the company said.
E Ink expects to ship between 30 million and 40 million units of smart e-tags, with more than half of those ordered primarily by European retailers, which are gradually replacing paper shelf labels with e-tags, it said.
“The growth momentum is to extend into next year,” E Ink official F.Y. Gan (甘豐源) said. “The biggest growth is expected to come from the US and China. Some large-scale retailers are testing our smart tags at their stores and could begin to adopt them sometime next year.”
The company said e-tags are increasingly used on luggage for travelers to check-in at airports via smartphone apps, replacing traditional paper tags.
“Luggage makers and airlines have approached us to study the feasibility of using smart tags to help their customers skip time-consuming airport check-in processes,” Gan said.
E Ink said it has shipped 100,000 smart tags for luggage in the past two years.
German luggage maker Rimowa GmbH recently released a new series of suitcases that integrate E Ink’s “smart” tags with Bluetooth, GPS and RFID technologies to help consumers track their suitcases.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS