Taiwanese companies yesterday expressed their faith in the digital industry as a viable business for the future, if not the immediate future, in view of growing demand for digital televisions in the West.
At a launching ceremony for digital TV Special Interest Group (DTV SIG) yesterday in Taipei, company representatives said Taiwan's strong supply-chain expertise and manufacturing prowess would help the nation's companies surpass their counterparts in Japan and South Korea.
The organization, composed of government and research agencies as well as local manufacturers, aims to promote the nation's digital industry. The government has said it wants to reach its goal of digital-TV services in 80 percent of the nation's households by 2006.
"Taiwan has earned a reputation in integrated circuit (IC) and computer industries in the world, and the experience can help Taiwanese companies move to the digital TV sector, which combines both IC and computer technology," said Alan Pan (潘泰吉), general manager of the multimedia communications division at Tatung Co (大同), one of the biggest local electronics makers.
Pan suggested Taiwanese companies interested in exploiting the digital TV sector -- including high-definition flat-panel TV displays, digital tuners and other video appliances -- target the US market.
The US Federal Communications Commission in August last year mandated that by mid-2007, all TV receiver sets larger than 13 inches sold in the US must contain digital TV tuners, which is expected to boost development of digital television in the market, Pan said.
Against this backdrop, shipments of digital TV sets to the US are expected to total 33.5 million units by 2007, more than half of the worldwide total, the US-based market research firm InStat/MDR said in a report last March. InStat/MDR predicted the global demand for digital TV sets will reach 58 million at that time.
"This is a great opportunity for our high-tech companies," Pan said. "As long as they can work together to create more added value for the product such as turning the digital TV set to a home entertainment device by integrating computer and other home appliances."
However, Pan said local manufacturers should refrain from investing heavily on brandname building and using that brand image to gain more market share.
"In competing head-to-head with global consumer electronics giants such as Sony, Panasonic and Samsung, brand name is no longer a panacea in this digital TV sector," Pan said. "What consumers care about in the digital era is the content, not the box."
Anne Tien (
"Consumers still have high loyalty to home appliances, so it will be easier to contract manufacturing for leading companies than creating a new brand," Tien said.
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
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
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
RSS