7-21: Qualcomm, Intel and ASML latest financial report; Softbank expects ARM to produce 1 trillion chips annually in 20 years; Corning has revealed Gorilla Glass 5; etc.
Qualcomm, Intel and ASML latest financial report; Softbank expects ARM to produce 1 trillion chips annually in 20 years; Corning has revealed Gorilla Glass 5; Worldwide smartphone production volume totaled around 315 million units in 2Q16; South Korea antitrust watchdog conducted an investigation into Google; Nearly 1/3 Americans would rather give up sex for 3 months instead of their smartphone for just 1 week; etc.
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Chipset |
| Qualcomm reports USD6 billion revenue for Q3 fiscal year 2016, operating income of USD1.6 billion and net income of USD1.4 billion. (Android Headlines, TechCrunch, ZDNet, Qualcomm, 163, Tencent, CN Beta)
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| Intel reported Q2 revenues of USD13.5 billion up 3% YoY, with net income of USD1.3 billion. The company is in the midst of a shift as a business, as it gears up for what many are betting could be the next big wave in computing, the Internet of Things. (CN Beta, TechCrunch, Intel)
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| Softbank Group CEO Masayoshi Son expects ARM to produce 1 trillion chips annually in 20 years. ARM made about 15 billion chips last year, meaning it provided an average of two chips for each person in the world. (CN Beta, Market Watch)
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| DARPA has a new program called CHIPS (Common Heterogenous Integration and Intellectual Property Reuse Strategies Program). DARPA wants “an entire PCB” to be condensed down into a single device that is about the size of one present-day chip. (CN Beta, Daily Mail, Slash Gear)
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| ASML announced net sales of EUR1.74 billion for the second quarter of 2016, up 30.5% from the previous quarter, while net profits increased 78.8% sequentially to EUR354 million. Gross margin stayed unchanged at 42.6%. (TechNews, Digitimes, press)
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| LG allegedly to launch its own processor dubbed Nuclun 2. From some alleged benchmark, it would be used for mid-to-low smartphones. (TechNews, WCCF Tech) |
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Touch Display |
| Corning has revealed Gorilla Glass 5 and claims that phones with Gorilla Glass 5 will survive being dropped from up to 1.6 meters 80% of the time. (Android Central, The Verge, Ubergizmo, Tencent)
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| PMOLED (passive-matrix OLED) is more competitive than AMOLED (active-matrix OLED) for small-size, especially below 2” panels mainly because of much lower production costs and easier customized production, according to chairman Wang Ding-chang for PMOLED panel maker RiTdisplay. RiTdisplay shipped nearly 85 million PMOLED panels for the largest global market share of 24.8% in 2015. (Digitimes, press, China Times) |
| There were 320 million large-size (above 9”) TFT-LCD panels shipped globally in 1H16, decreasing 6% on year, but the corresponding total area of 78.4 million square meters increased 2% due to increased average screen sizes for LCD TVs and notebooks, according to IHS. (Digitimes, press) |
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Sensors |
| ABI Research forecasts the installed base of active wireless connected devices will top 47 billion by 2021, more than double the current level. A 24.1% CAGR through 2021 positions 2016 to be the first year that accessories and sensor nodes are in the majority, rising to more than 65% of total active connections by the end of the forecast period. (Digitimes, ABI Research, press, Sohu) |
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Biometrics |
| Internet Finance Association Alliance (IFAA) has announced that after a year of establishment, it has attracted Qualcomm, MediaTek, Huawei, Samsung, Xiaomi, etc. members. It has drafted 4 standards for facial, fingerprint authentication. Now there is 100 million users using products or services that adopt the said standards. The next step is iris authentication. (CN Beta, Huanqiu, Sohu) |
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Material |
| To better protect these hydrophobic products, a team of researchers has developed a new form of water-resistant plastic using graphene. The material looks and feels like plastic, but it is a million times more water resistant than the standard plastics currently in use. (Digital Trends, ACS, 163) |
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Smartphones |
| Worldwide smartphone production volume totaled around 315 million units in 2Q16, representing an 8.9% increase over the previous quarter and a marginal year-on-year increase of 3.2%, according to TrendForce. The combined production volume of Chinese brands 2Q16 reached 139 million units, up 13.8% from the previous quarter. (TechNews, TrendForce[cn], press, TrendForce, press)
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| Uber reached 2 billion rides on June 18. The 2 billionth ride was completed through 147 simultaneous rides in 16 countries. (Digital Trends, Sina, Reuters) |
| BlackBerry CEO John Chen slammed Apple chief Tim Cook in a Tuesday speech, suggesting that Cook was putting his company’s reputation “above the greater good”. (9to5Mac, BGR, CN Beta, Apple Insider) |
| South Korea antitrust watchdog conducted an investigation into Google Inc. over allegedly forcing smartphone makers to use its operating system in their handsets. (CN Beta, Yonhap News) |
| Nearly 1/3 Americans would rather give up sex for 3 months instead of their smartphone for just 1 week according to a new survey from mobile intelligence developer Delvv. Roughly 29% of respondents would rather give up sex for an entire quarter instead of exchanging their smartphone for a “dumb phone” for a single week. (CN Beta, Bustle, Techspot) |
| In China, the web is giving a big boost to a more conventional leisure-time pursuit: reading novels. 43% of China’s online population, or 297 million people, read novels online in 2015, according to a government report. (CN Beta, WSJ) |
| UK-based Omnifone’s tech business and assets had been purchased by a mystery buyer for USD10 million, and it seems the alleged buyer is Apple. (CN Beta, Mac Rumors, Music Ally)
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Tablets |
| Xiaomi reportedly plans to release 2 versions of their Mi Notebook: a 12.5” version manufactured by Inventec that is already in mass production and a 13” version which will be mass produced later by Wistron. Xiaomi expects shipments of the notebook to reach at least 1 million units. (Gizmo China, iFeng)
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Wearables |
| According to GfK, entering 2016 China VR online market size after 4-month explosive growth, in May the online retail sales has grown 20%, which shows some slowing down, in fact the retail value share shows 3% shrinkage. In May the main reason of declining retail sales is because the costs of mobile VR product are dropping, the ASP drops from CNY120 to CNY94. (199IT, Xinwenge)
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Internet of Things |
| Funai Electric has recently announced that they will be officially ceasing the manufacturing of VCRs in July 2016. (Ubergizmo, Mental Floss, Hexun, 163) |
| Panasonic has announced plans to cross into the robot control equipment market as the company is optimistic about demand for robots from they factory and medical care segments and the company expects the market’s scale to reach several tens of billions of yen by 2020. (Digitimes, press, CNFOL) |
