HTC Corp (宏達電) yesterday said that it is aiming to secure its home market share by selling more 4G smartphones this year, as local telecom operators prepare to launch 4G network services.
“HTC is planning to offer consumers a variety of 4G-capable smartphones to retain its leadership in the home market,” HTC’s president for the Greater China region Jack Tong (董俊良) said at the product launches of the phone maker’s new 4G Long-Term Evolution (LET) One and Butterfly S smartphones.
The latest instalment of the company’s flagship One series will be available starting today and will carry the same NT$19,900 price tag as its 3G version. The new Butterfly S 4G LTE model is set to hit the market as early as Wednesday next week and retail at NT$20,900.
The Taoyuan-based company said it also has plans to launch tailor-made 4G handsets for the nation’s top three telecom carriers — Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大) and Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (遠傳電信) — for use in various frequency spectrums.
Tong said that after the rollout, HTC’s new 4G smartphones are forecast to account for more than 50 percent of the company’s total products.
When asked if the smartphone vendor would use Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek Inc’s (聯發科) chipset products — which cheaper than those made by Qualcomm Inc — to reduce manufacturing costs, Tong said: “HTC does not rule out any opportunity to adopt different technologies or collaborate with new partners.”
JPMorgan analyst Alvin Kwock (郭彥麟) said that HTC could increase its market share during the first half of the year if it manages to sell 100 million units of TD-LTE smartphones in China.
Citing the three low-end Desire series models that the company launched last month, Kwock said that HTC’s inclusion of processors made by Broadcom Corp, ST-Ericsson and Spreadtrum Communications Inc (展訊通信) in the three products “marked its attempt to make a comeback in the sector by making China its home market.”
However, HTC might not fare well for long, given the strong likelihood that rival Chinese vendors will launch competing 4G products in the second half of the year, Kwock said in a note to clients on Monday.
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
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
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