Taiwan’s HTC Corp (宏達電) was ranked as the world’s seventh-largest mobile phone maker last quarter as the smartphone penetration rate continued to grow, according to a report released by market researcher Gartner Inc.
Worldwide mobile phone sales totaled 428.7 million units in the second quarter of this year, a 16.5 percent increase year-on-year, the US-based information technology research firm reported.
Nokia remained in the top spot with shipments of 97.9 million units and a market share of 22.8 percent. It was followed by Samsung Electronics Co, which has a 16.3 percent market share. LG, which garnered a 5.7 percent share, came next to rank third. Apple Inc was the fourth largest with a market share of 4.6 percent. China’s ZTE Corp (中興通訊) got a 3 percent share and ranked fifth, according to Gartner’s tally. Research In Motion took the sixth spot with 3 percent market share.
HTC improved its ranking by one notch to No. 7 last quarter from No. 8 a year ago, according to Gartner. Market share rose to 2.6 percent last quarter from 1.6 percent, the researcher’s statistics showed.
Last quarter, HTC shipped 11.02 million units of smartphones, up from 5.91 million in the same period of last year, according to the report.
Apple shipped 19.6 million iPhones in the April-to-June quarter, representing year-on-year growth of 124.5 percent, which was also the strongest growth among the top 10 handset vendors.
After Apple, China’s ZTE enjoyed robust growth of 94.2 percent annually, followed by HTC, which saw its shipments expand by 86.4 percent annually.
Meanwhile, sales of smartphones were up 74 percent year-on-year and accounted for 25 percent of overall sales during the second quarter, up from 17 percent in the second quarter of last year, Gartner said.
“Smartphone sales continued to rise at the expense of feature phones,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, in the report.
“Consumers in mature markets are choosing entry-level and midrange Android smartphones over feature phones, partly due to carriers’ and manufacturers’ promotions,” she said.
The combined share of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating system in the smartphone OS market accounted for 62 percent in the second quarter of this year, nearly double the figure of just over 31 percent in the corresponding period last year.
The Android platform, which is run on most of HTC’s phones, topped the second-quarter smartphone OS market with a 43.4 percent share, compared with 17.2 percent in the same period last year.
The increasing demand for the Android platform can be attributed to its usability that consumers enjoy and its apps that consumers feel they need, Gartner said.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS