E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技), the world’s sole supplier of e-paper displays, yesterday said it plans to start mass-producing advanced color e-paper (ACeP) displays early next year, aimed at the public information display market.
The company has been investing in the development of ACeP to broaden the adoption of e-paper displays, which are mainly used for e-readers and electronic shelf labels, to boost revenue.
“Public information display is our first target market, given its relatively slower response time,” company president Johnson Lee (李政昊) said on the sidelines of the annual Touch Taiwan 2018 Display International Exhibition at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center.
The company plans to produce 13-inch advanced color e-paper displays, using its Advanced Color ePaper technology, E Ink said.
The color displays can be pieced together to make a bigger display wall for commercial use, it said.
SALES CONTRIBUTION
The new e-paper displays are expected to start contributing to revenues next year, it said.
About 70 percent of the company’s first-half revenue of NT$6.51 billion (US$212 million) came from e-paper displays for e-readers, while the remaining 30 percent came from electronic shelf labels.
E Ink currently only produces e-papers with three colors.
Three-color e-paper displays accounted for 40 percent of the company’s total shipments in terms of square meters, it said.
APPLICATIONS
The company yesterday showcased a series of new e-paper displays for different applications, including for smart bus stations and eNotebooks at the trade show.
It also featured e-paper displays for bedheads and medicine infusion displays, which it said have been introduced to major hospitals in the nation, including National Taiwan University Hospital.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy