11-05: SK Hynix has recently struck a deal with China’s city government of Wuxi to expand its DRAM production; Sprint majority owner SoftBank has reportedly decided to end merger talks with T-Mobile and its majority owner Deutsche Telekom; etc.
Chipsets
Qualcomm introduced Qualcomm Life 6 years ago, focusing on developing wireless technology for healthcare. Qualcomm was already building infrastructure to support the next generation of wireless tech; hospitals and home care seemed a worthy beneficiary. Rick Valencia, the president of Qualcomm Life, indicates that the goal in the end is to get patients connected in the hospital, in the home, or anywhere in between through one regulated medical grade and secure platform. (Laoyaoba, CECB2B, Qualcomm, Qualcomm, report, Wired)
Professor Amnon Shashua, Mobileye CEO and Intel senior vice president, offered the autonomous driving industry a way to prove the safety of autonomous vehicles. The proposed Responsibility Sensitive Safety model provides specific and measurable parameters for the human concepts of responsibility and caution and defines a “Safe State,” where the autonomous vehicle cannot be the cause of an accident, no matter what action is taken by other vehicles. (Mashable, Intel, summary, Laoyaoba)
After 4G, 5G is becoming the next direction for communication industry. 5G will make “Internet of Everything” possible. Chipset vendors are working towards 5G based on this idea. (Laoyaoba, SEMI)
Touch Display
MagnaChip generated revenues of USD176.7M with a 28.% gross profit margin and a net income of USD5.6M in 3Q17. Magnachip has reported that revenue from OLED display driver ICs increased 15.6% from 2Q17. The company currently anticipates that it has the potential to generate OLED revenue that will exceed 50% growth and exceed USD100M in 2018. (OLED-Info, PR Newswire)
Universal Display (UDC) revenues in 3Q17 reached USD61.7M, up 104% from 3Q16 (USD30.2M) driven by strong material sales and also increased royalty and license fees. Net income in 3Q17 was USD13.5M (up USD15M from a USD1.5M loss in 2Q16). (Laoyaoba, Money DJ, OLED-Info, UDC)
Camera
Bernstein indicates that Apple and other smartphone vendors using 3D technology, driving the camera lens shipment from 3.4B units in 2016 to grow to 6.7B units in 2021. Bernstein’s analyst David Dai reckons lens market is led by 3 vendors namely Largan Precision, AAC Technologies, and Sunny Optical. Largan will be the most beneficial party of iPhone 3D sensor, follows by AAC. Sunny will be profitable from Android’s smartphones. (Barron’s, TTV, Laoyaoba)
Memory
SK Hynix has recently struck a deal with China’s city government of Wuxi to expand its DRAM production capacity locally with total investment estimated at USD8.6B. The additional capacity, when operational, will increase SK Hynix’s DRAM output from Wuxi to 200,000 wafers built using 1Xnm technology. SK Hynix currently produces about 130,000 wafers monthly at the Wuxi fab, which account for around half of the company’s total DRAM production. (TechNews, Digitimes, press)
Biometrics
Apple’s privacy promises allegedly do not extend to the thousands of app developers who will gain access to facial data in order to build entertainment features for iPhone X customers, such as pinning a three-dimensional mask to their face for a selfie or letting a video game character mirror the player’s real-world facial expressions. (Slate, Laoyaoba, Reuters)
Connectivity
China Telecom Group’s Technology Committee chief Wei Leping indicates that China’s 5G investments will ramp up over the next decade. Jefferies has estimated China’s 5G-related capital expenditure to reach approximately USD180B in a 6-year period ending 2025, with Mr. Wei deeming that prediction acceptable and attaching the same label to the company’s forecast of a USD280B 5G capex over the next decade. (Android Headlines, Takung Pao, OfWeek)
Sprint majority owner SoftBank has reportedly decided to end merger talks with T-Mobile and its majority owner Deutsche Telekom over which side would have majority control of the combined firm. Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure said in a joint statement with T-Mobile, that even though no deal was reached, both Sprint and T-Mobile see the benefits to a combination of the two wireless operators. (Phone Arena, Bloomberg, T-Mobile, iFeng)
Smartphones
Sony will begin making two models in the INR12,000~15,000 range – one of the fastest growing segments in the industry – in India from Nov 2017 through Foxconn’s India unit Rising Star Mobile India, which has 5 plants in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh. (Digitimes, CNA, Economic Times, Laoyaoba)
Wearables
Experts see offline venues such as virtual reality (VR) arcades, where users can try games without buying their own equipment, as a way to fill this gap in the short term. In China, there are an estimated 12,000 brick-and-mortar VR experience centers – though generating profit continues to be a struggle. iResearch believes offline experience centers have become an important way to educate the VR market. (EE World, Digitimes, Laoyaoba, Tech in Asia)
Internet of Things
Tesla is setting a “rough target” of producing cars in China in about three years. Tesla CEO Elon Musk reveals that Tesla’s planned factory in China will likely focus on making Model 3 sedans and Tesla’s planned crossover vehicle, Model Y, for China and for some surrounding countries, Musk said. (TechNews, CNBC, WSJ)
As 2017 comes to an end, global market intelligence provider TrendForce has unveiled a list of top 10 trends in the information and communication technology sector for 2018. These trends will be influencing the development of key industries in the upcoming year. (TrendForce[cn], TechNews, TrendForce, press)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not destructive, asserted Rob High, International Business Machine (IBM) Watson Chief Technology Officer. He also explains that AI products in the consumer market are unlike the cognitive technologies provided by IBM’s Watson. Watson focuses on solving business problems and expanding human cognition to help users make the right business decisions. (Laoyaoba, China Post, Focus Taiwan, VentureBeat)
Cisco announces to bring voice control to its Cisco Spark Room series hardware. The Cisco Spark Assistant uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand what a person wants by harnessing technology from MindMeld, the AI startup Cisco acquired in May 2017 for USD125M. (CN Beta, TechCrunch, VentureBeat)
