Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) aims to boost its 5G penetration rate by 10 percentage points to about 35 percent this year, amid demand from government agencies and enterprise clients for high-speed Internet connections and private networks, the company said yesterday.
Chunghwa, the nation’s biggest telecom, had accumulated 2.45 million 5G subscribers as of the end of last year, accounting for about 25 percent of its overall mobile users, data compiled by the National Communications Commission showed.
“We expect 5G subscription to grow at a similar pace as last year,” Chunghwa Telecom chairman Sheih Chi-mau (謝繼茂) told a news conference in Taipei.
Photo: CNA
Chunghwa Telecom said that government agencies and industrial users are the early adopters of 5G networks, followed by individual subscribers, which is starkly different from the uptake of 4G.
It has made good progress in helping enterprise clients build private 5G networks, obtaining 90 percent of the deals among the nation’s large-scale enterprises, it said.
Local telecoms would likely be disciplined on pricing strategy, as it would take longer to break even on 5G services compared with 4G, given the heavy infrastructure deployment and investment, Sheih said.
The companies spent 10 years making 4G services a profitable business, he said.
To stimulate 5G adoption and to satisfy demand for emerging applications, Chunghwa Telecom said it plans to add 1,700 workers this year, with 41 percent of the initial hires focused on artificial intelligence, cloud services, cybersecurity and data services.
To attract and retain talent, it is raising the starting salary for entry-level jobs to NT$40,000 (US$1,324), from about NT$37,000, it said.
Increases in human resource expenses are to eliminate about NT$0.05 from the company’s earnings per share a year, it said.
The company also set a mid-term goal of boosting revenue from three rapidly growing businesses — cloud-based services, cybersecurity and 5G-based artificial intelligence of things — to reach NT$10 billion each by 2025.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
RSS