Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) has teamed up with Japanese home appliance giant Sharp Corp and China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) to develop Internet TV, Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) said on Thursday.
Speaking to reporters in China at a cloud-based-technology conference in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, Gou said that Hon Hai has applied the YunOS operating system developed by Alibaba to Sharp’s Internet TV production as part of efforts to roll out Internet TV.
Sharp is one of Hon Hai’s subsidiaries after the Taiwanese firm completed an acquisition deal in August to take a 66 percent share in the financially struggling Japanese firm, which has more than 20,000 product designers, engineers and workers.
Alibaba has not only provided YunOS to Sharp for Internet TV development, but will also provide assistance to the Japanese firm in cloud-based technology and TV sales under the multiple cooperation program, according to reports from China.
Gou said that Internet TV development is just part of the cooperation among the three companies, adding that Hon Hai is determined to integrate resources with Sharp and Alibaba to develop a “smart home” industry.
According to the smart home development blueprint, Gou said the three partners would also work on cloud technology and robot development.
To meet demand in the Internet era, Gou said that Sharp would upgrade the specifications of semiconductors installed in its TV products, without elaborating on the IC upgrade.
TRADE-INS
Meanwhile, Gou said that Hon Hai is pushing for a trade-in project for Sharp.
In the project, buyers of Sharp TVs who sign up with the Japanese firm will be able to swap their old TVs for a new one after a certain period, he said.
In turn, Hon Hai will fix the used TVs and donate the devices to poor families in a bid to maximize their use, he added.
Separately, Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD), struggling to re-establish its data center chip business, said Alibaba plans to provide cloud-computing services based on its graphics semiconductors.
China’s largest e-commerce company is working to expand the range of services it offers over the Internet and will work with AMD to use the chipmaker’s Radeon Pro graphics, the companies said in a statement yesterday.
For AMD, which is the second-largest maker of graphics chips used in high-end computers behind Nvidia Corp, the deal offers the chance to return to the lucrative data center market dominated by Intel Corp.
AMD, based in Sunnyvale, California, has begun its fightback from market share losses to Nvidia in graphics and Intel in general-purpose processors with new products that have closed the gap in performance.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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