Prime View International Co Ltd (元太科技), the world’s biggest supplier of electronic paper displays used in e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle series, yesterday signed a letter of intent with Chinese publisher Phoenix Publishing & Media Network (鳳凰集團) to form a joint venture that will supply e-readers for the student market.
That will bring Prime View one step closer to its goal of offering digitalized textbooks and related applications through light and power-saving e-readers — replacing traditional schoolbags, which are heavy and bulky.
Prime View, headquartered in Hsinchu, said that the joint venture could help boost uptake of e-readers by tapping into China’s digital textbook market.
No financial details such as initial capital investment, shareholding distribution and production capacity were disclosed.
The two companies will collaborate in providing digital content such as textbooks, reference books and dictionaries on e-readers, as well as other applications for downloading, to cater to the needs of Chinese students, a joint statement released yesterday said.
“This deep cooperation between the two companies ... not only will benefit China’s 300 million students, but will also have a profound impact on the expansion of the e-reader market,” Prime View chairman Scott Liu (劉思誠) said in the statement.
Prime View said it had developed flexible e-paper displays and touch displays to make thinner and lighter e-readers, which users can also use to write notes on them.
The joint-venture is still subject to approval by the two companies’ boards.
Last month, Prime View said it planned to invest NT$500 million (US$15.7 million) to expand its e-paper display capacity in China over the next five years to cope with rapidly growing demand, shrugging off direct competition from Apple Inc’s iPad tablet PC.
Global shipments of e-readers this year are expected to more than triple to 15.21 million units from 4.99 million units last year, market researcher Displaysearch forecast.
Prime View has accumulated NT$6.71 billion in revenues in the first four months of this year, up 71.2 percent from NT$3.92 billion in the same period last year, according to a company filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Shares of Prime View were unchanged at NT$53.50 yesterday on the GRETAI Securities Market.
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