Smartphone maker HTC Corp will boost its patent portfolio after competitor Apple Inc flexed its muscles to block HTC products in the US market, chairwoman Cher Wang (王雪紅) said yesterday.
“Apple is a company with a lot of muscle,” Wang said on the sidelines of a ceremony to celebrate the company’s 15th anniversary.
“This is our challenge,” Wang said. “HTC is not afraid of the challenge and will persevere through continuous innovation.”
The chairwoman’s comments came as the company opened its new global headquarters in Sindian Distict (新店), New Taipei City (新北市), yesterday. Wang said the new headquarters demonstrated the Taiwanese brand’s determination.
The new 17-story headquarters will employ 2,000 people, including 1,000 research and development staff, who will use more than half of the building’s space. The new building also achieved Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold certification by incorporating a number of sustainable energy design elements.
HTC had first dreamed of transforming the cellphone market 15 years ago, Wang said, and that dream became a reality when it made the world’s first smartphone 10 years ago. Now, HTC is working on 4G LTE technology, Wang added.
“HTC will keep dreaming,” she said, adding that the high rate of consumers replacing smartphones means HTC is in the right market.
Qualcomm chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs, who also attended the ceremony, said that HTC and Qualcomm began cooperating in 2008 on the HTC G1 3G Android mobile phone, adding that they began working on Windows phones in 2010.
“Now we are working together on 4G LTE, so we have worked together from 3G to 4G,” Jacobs said.
The relationship with Taiwan is very important to Qualcomm because of companies like HTC and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and events like Computex, he said, adding that Qualcomm has been getting most of its 28-nanometer chips from TSMC for its smartphone and tablet customers.
AT&T senior vice president of devices Jeff Bradley said his company is impressed by HTC’s products and honored to be the sole carrier of HTC One X in the US market.
The two companies have been working together for more than a decade, he added.
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