Samsung Electronics Co, Asia's largest electronics maker by market value, plans to triple MP3 sales this year and unseat iPod-maker Apple Computer Inc as the world's top manufacturer of the portable music players by 2007.
The company plans to sell at least 5 million units this year from 1.7 million in 2004, Ahn Tai-ho, head of the Suwon, South Korea-based company's MP3 unit, said in Seoul today.
Samsung expects to sell about 1 million units in the first quarter and increase shipments to about 12 million next year, he said.
Samsung joins Sony Corp., and other electronics makers rushing to enter a market forecast to jump 50 percent to US$6.9 billion this year. Demand for the iPod, which can download and store thousands of digital songs in each machine, helped Apple more than quadruple its fiscal first-quarter profit this year.
"MP3s are basically one of the first things that young people buy nowadays" when they have the money, said Ahn, chief executive of Bluetek Co, which is 100 percent owned by Samsung Electronics. "This is the year we're really getting serious in MP3." In today's press conference the company unveiled six MP3 player models under its Yepp brand that will be introduced during the first half of the year. The models include the YH-J70, with a 30-gigabyte storage capacity.
Samsung will need to raise its market share to between 20 percent and 25 percent of global sales to be the industry's top producer, Ahn said. He said he expects Samsung, Sony and Apple to be the top-tier producers by 2007.
Sony last week announced in Las Vegas that it will sell a new line of flash memory-based MP3 players with up to 70 hours of battery life.
Still, Samsung's pretax profit margin for MP3s may fall to about 5 percent from about 10 percent now as competition intensifies and prices decline, Ahn said.
Samsung will focus its sales on MP3 players with flash- memory chips, which are smaller and can store fewer songs than the type that has hard disk drives, because of Apple's dominance in the market for HDD-type MP3s, Ahn said. Samsung plans to sell 4.2 million MP3 players with flash memory and about 800,000 with hard-disk drive in 2005, he said.
The company is the world's largest flash-memory maker.
The global market for MP3 players will probably rise to 35 million to 45 million units this year, from 20 million to 25 million units in 2004, he said. Next year, shipments may rise to 55 million units, he said.
Global MP3 shipments may fall short of industry predictions because some companies can procure parts cheaper by overstating projections, Ahn said.
El Segundo, California-based ISuppli Corp said last month that global MP3 shipments will rise to 58 million units this year from 37 million in 2004 and jump to 80 million in 2006. Sales will rise to $6.9 billion this year from $4.6 billion in 2004, according to ISuppli.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) secured a record 70.2 percent share of the global foundry business in the second quarter, up from 67.6 percent the previous quarter, and continued widening its lead over second-placed Samsung Electronics Co, TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said on Monday. TSMC posted US$30.24 billion in sales in the April-to-June period, up 18.5 percent from the previous quarter, driven by major smartphone customers entering their ramp-up cycle and robust demand for artificial intelligence chips, laptops and PCs, which boosted wafer shipments and average selling prices, TrendForce said in a report. Samsung’s sales also grew in the second quarter, up
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump weighed in on a pressing national issue: The rebranding of a restaurant chain. Last week, Cracker Barrel, a Tennessee company whose nationwide locations lean heavily on a cozy, old-timey aesthetic — “rocking chairs on the porch, a warm fire in the hearth, peg games on the table” — announced it was updating its logo. Uncle Herschel, the man who once appeared next to the letters with a barrel, was gone. It sparked ire on the right, with Donald Trump Jr leading a charge against the rebranding: “WTF is wrong with Cracker Barrel?!” Later, Trump Sr weighed
HEADWINDS: Upfront investment is unavoidable in the merger, but cost savings would materialize over time, TS Financial Holding Co president Welch Lin said TS Financial Holding Co (台新新光金控) said it would take about two years before the benefits of its merger with Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控) become evident, as the group prioritizes the consolidation of its major subsidiaries. “The group’s priority is to complete the consolidation of different subsidiaries,” Welch Lin (林維俊), president of the nation’s fourth-largest financial conglomerate by assets, told reporters during its first earnings briefing since the merger took effect on July 24. The asset management units are scheduled to merge in November, followed by life insurance in January next year and securities operations in April, Lin said. Banking integration,
LOOPHOLES: The move is to end a break that was aiding foreign producers without any similar benefit for US manufacturers, the US Department of Commerce said US President Donald Trump’s administration would make it harder for Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc to ship critical equipment to their chipmaking operations in China, dealing a potential blow to the companies’ production in the world’s largest semiconductor market. The US Department of Commerce in a notice published on Friday said that it was revoking waivers for Samsung and SK Hynix to use US technologies in their Chinese operations. The companies had been operating in China under regulations that allow them to import chipmaking equipment without applying for a new license each time. The move would revise what is known
RSS