IF / News

A week has passed quietly. A quick review of last week:

Headlines:

• OPPO’s India factory, scheduled to come online later Feb 2017, will be able to produce an initial 50M units per year
• Apple will in Apr 2017 begin manufacturing iPhone SE at a plant in Bengaluru, targeting final output at 300K~400K units
• ZTE said it is negotiating to settle trade restrictions imposed by U.S. authorities
• Huawei could be developing their own virtual assistant geared towards their home market, China.
• HTC has announced that the company will be excluding the entry level segment from their smartphone business
• South Korea Central District Court has approved an arrest warrant for the acting head of the Samsung Group, Jay Y. Lee
• Kodak would license its brand to French multinational electronics firm Archos, for use in the European market.
• Intel has confirmed that its upcoming 8th generation of processors is going to stick with the 14nm process
• MediaTek may suffer a setback in the ongoing 10nm mobile chip race as Xiaomi has reportedly decided to not develop a customized 10nm Helio X30 chip with MediaTek
• Japan Display Inc (JDI) announced the development of a 4.0” high-transmittance (80%) color transparent display
• Samsung Display has won a fresh deal with Apple to supply an additional 60M units of 5” OLED panels, worth of KRW5T (USD4.3B)
• While Apple has not yet decided if it will partner with BOE on a next-generation iPhone display, it is already evaluating the Chinese manufacturer’s AMOLED panels
• Apple is now listed as one of the 213 members of the Wireless Power Consortium
• Samsung has reportedly already contracted Sony to make batteries for its next-gen flagship smartphone

Numbers:

• According to IDC, India registered 109.1M units of smartphone shipments with a marginal 5.2% annual growth in 2016
• Global sales of smartphones to end users totaled 432M units in 4Q16, a 7% increase over 4Q15, according to Gartner
• Canalys estimates that for the full year 2016, China reached 476.5M unit shipments, growing year on year at 11.4%
• TrendForce reports annual tablet shipments worldwide posted a decline for 2016, dropping 6.6% to 157.4M units