ELECTRONICS
Asustek sets ‘ZenTalk’ date
Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) yesterday said it is to convene its annual “ZenTalk” conference in Taipei on Aug. 26 to showcase its upcoming flagship handset, the ZenFone 4, and its augmented reality (AR) smartphone, the ZenFone AR, to consumers. It is the third consecutive year the company has hosted the conference in the city, as part of the firm’s strategy to promote its smartphones and create a closer relationship with its consumers. Asustek said a “high-ranking” executive would personally introduce the features of the new products and dine with the participants. Asustek has not yet sent out invitations to the ZenFone 4 product launch after the company reportedly postponed it from the end of this month to the middle of next month.
TECHNOLOGY
Kinsus net income plunges
Kinsus Interconnect Technology Corp (景碩科技), a silicon substrate manufacturing arm of Pegatron Corp (和碩), yesterday reported net income of NT$63.39 million (US$2.09 million) for last quarter, down from the NT$603.32 million it made in the same period last year. Earnings per share were NT$0.14, compared with last year’s NT$1.35. The result brought the company’s combined net profit for the first half to NT$199.94 million, down from NT$1.11 billion last year, according to a company filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The company has not yet set a date for its investors’ conference, at which it plans to announce its outlook for the remainder of this year.
ELECTRONICS
Hon Hai in India talks
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) is in talks with a major industrial group in India to introduce low-end mobile phones in the nation, according to an Indian media report. The Economic Times reported over the weekend that Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康), has entered into negotiations with Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) to make low-priced mobile phones under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” initiative. The report said that Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecom subsidiary of RIL, is planning to launch dual SIM mobile phones costing between US$23 and US$25. The report said that the mobile phones would be equipped with 2G and 4G SIM card slots and are expected to use chips designed by China’s Spreadtrum Communications Inc (展訊).
SHIPBUILDERS
CSBC Corp delivers vessel
CSBC Corp, Taiwan (台灣國際造船) yesterday said that TS Lines Co (德翔海運) has taken delivery of a 1,800 twenty-foot equivalent unit Bangkok-max vessel that it was commissioned to design and build. Despite a downturn in the global cargo shipping sector, TS Lines is committed to updating its fleet and the company has three more of the vessels on order, CSBC Corp said. The new vessel is 25 percent more fuel efficient than vessels built 10 years ago, the shipbuilder said.
ECONOMY
M1B grows 4.43 percent
M1B money supply, which refers to cash and cash equivalents, grew 4.43 percent year-on-year last month, faster than the broader gauge M2 — M1B, savings deposits, time savings deposits and foreign currency deposits — which grew 3.71 percent, the central bank said yesterday. As M1B is often linked to liquidity available for stock investments, the trend might reflect an upturn in investor confidence, as the two measures displayed a so-called “golden cross,” the bank said.
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
At a red-brick factory in the German port city of Hamburg, cocoa bean shells go in one end and out the other comes an amazing black powder with the potential to counter climate change. The substance, dubbed biochar, is produced by heating the cocoa husks in an oxygen-free room to 600°C. The process locks in greenhouse gases and the final product can be used as a fertilizer, or as an ingredient in the production of “green” concrete. While the biochar industry is still in its infancy, the technology offers a novel way to remove carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere, experts have said. Biochar could
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