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.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS