Taipei, May 23, 2012 (CENS)–Around 100 more Taiwan-made information-technology products are estimated to be included in zero or low-tariff categories in talks recently proposed by the United States addressing expansion of world trade in information technology products concluded in the Information Technology Agreement (ITA).

Taiwan’s Vice Economics Minister K.H. Liang pointed out that Taiwan has entered into substantive talks with the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada and Singapore over the expansion issue. Liang recently returned from World Trade Organization-organized ITA annual meeting in Geneva with the inspiring information. He said the proposal won high consensus among member states and the talks are likely to take place this year.

The Information Technology Agreement (ITA) is a pact enforced by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and concluded in the Ministerial Declaration on Trade in Information Technology Products in 1996. It took effect on July 1, 1997.

Liang regards ITA as the information-technology version of free trade agreement (FTA), providing Taiwan’s IT products with favorable trade conditions in international trade at a time when the island is still striving for FTA talks with economic powers. He noted that around half of the 66% of Taiwan’s exports to the United States eligible for duty-free terms are IT products included in ITA, making Taiwan’s foreign trade fail to be impacted harshly although it has few FTA partners.

In the new round of talks, Taiwan’s IT products likely to enjoy favorable conditions include solar cell components, shield films for optoelectronic products, planarization liquid for semiconductors, global positioning system (GPS).

American think tanks estimate ITA expansion to create US$800 billion of trade value for world IT industry once the deal is stricken.
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Taipei, May 24 (CNA) Taiwan’s exports are focused alarmingly heavily on information and communication technology products, a trade official said Thursday, concerned that the Greece debt crisis could destabilize the economy of the eurozone, which would have a global impact.

Exports could be seriously affected if, for example, the country’s only smartphone exporter and maker — HTC — encounters problems such as delayed new product launches or obstruction from other competitors, Chang Chun-fu, a spokesman for the Bureau of Foreign Trade (BOFT), told CNA.

One Taiwanese computer disc maker has already been facing similar problems to this in India, Chang said.

Taiwan’s major trade rival, South Korea, on the other hand, has strong steel, automobile, cultural creative and tourism industries, in addition to its competitive ICT sector, the official pointed out. This means business cycles and situations that affect individual regions and individual products are less likely to have an impact on its overall economy, he said.

The BOFT has launched a program in a bid to help local businesses establish footholds around the world instead of concentrating on one single market or product, Chang said.

However, the results of these efforts to expand markets in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Middle East might not be seen for some time, since some countries in these regions require complex certification for imports, Chang added.

Meanwhile, Europe’s economic outlook is unlikely to improve in the short term, and this will affect not only Taiwan’s exports to the EU but also to China, Taiwan’s largest source of export orders, said Chang.

Taiwan’s overall exports to China declined in April, except for ICT products, which jumped by 10 percent, Chang went on, citing recently released statistics.

Moreover, export orders — an indication of shipments in the next one to three months — from Europe, Japan and China all fell in value, with a 3.52 percent year-on-year decrease in total orders, the biggest single-month drop in 2.5 years, according to the statistics.

Domestic demand in Europe, China’s largest export market, could drop if the EU adopts further austerity measures, Chang continued. This could prompt China in turn to cut back on imports from Taiwan due to falling domestic buying power resulting from the EU’s slowing economy, he added.

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Taipei, May 27 (CNA) Company representatives from around the world will be able to put their hands on ultra-thin laptops running on Microsoft Corp.’s highly anticipated operating system at Computex Taipei in June, according to one of the organizers.

This year at Computex, visitors will see a preview on Windows 8-based ultrabooks, said Enoch Du, secretary-general of the Taipei Computer Association, which co-organizes the world’s second largest tech trade fair.

“Although Microsoft is very cautious about the launch, vendors in fact are ready to offer the Windows 8 devices, including ultrabooks, tablet computers and smart handheld devices,” he told CNA in an interview recently.

“You can put your hands on the models and directly use them,” Du added. “With the release of the Windows 8, there will be a ‘big jump’ in ultrabook (sales) volumes.”

In the fourth quarter of 2011, the world’s top five PC vendors all introduced ultrabook products, but their price tags exceeded US$1,000, making the products less attractive to consumers, according to DRAMeXchange Technology Inc.

Looking at the price, the average notebook selling prices are about US$650 in 2012, so ultrabook prices need to dip below US$700 to be acceptable to consumers, the research firm said.

Given the expected price cut, ultrabook shipments are forecast at 20 million units in 2012, taking 10 percent of the overall notebook shipments compared with 2 percent last year, it predicted.

Meanwhile, the PC industry chain will see a big change in business models, such as the integration of mobile chipsets designed by ARM Holdings Plc, which are widely used in Android-based smartphones and tablet PCs to achieve lower power consumption, Du noted.

Intel Corp., which supplies processors for Ultrabooks, has forecast that the category may be priced as low as US$599 in the second half of this year when manufacturers use new and cheaper casing materials, such as a mixture of plastics and aluminum.

The U.S. chipmaker projected that the new models to be launched in the third and fourth quarter will support new functions, such as touch-enabled screens and gesture sensors, which will help drive the overall demand.

For 2012 as a whole, Intel expected ultrabooks to account for 30 to 40 percent of the global notebook shipments thanks to the introduction of lower priced models.

However, Du said that 20 percent will be a more reasonable penetration rate in 2012, as Intel’s forecast looks more like a long-term target.

“The pricing for ultrabooks is related to the total volume,” he explained. “When the volume increases, component costs will drop and then lower the retail prices, driving a virtuous cycle”

“I’m optimistic that ultrabooks will become cheaper and cheaper, but it will be quite difficult to see US$599 models this year,” Du said.

In April, Asustek Computer Inc. said ultrabooks will gain more momentum in the second half of this year thanks to the increase in supply of new chipsets and the expected launch of the new Windows system.

The Taiwanese PC brand plans to roll out a number of new ultrabooks priced from US$799 to US$1,999 starting in the April-June period, and the company expects the category to account for 10 to 20 percent of its total notebook shipments this year.

Separately, Taiwan’s Acer Inc. has reduced its ultrabook prices to as low as US$799 in selected regions, but the price remained too high for consumers, compared with a price tag of US$400 to US$500 for mainstream notebooks.

Acer projected that ultrabooks will account for 12 to 20 percent of its total notebook shipments by the end of this year, which will be lower than the 25 to 35 percent that the company forecast earlier because of less promotion from the industry.

Both Asustek and Acer are slated to hold pre-show conferences for Computex Taipei on June 4.

Computex Taipei, to be held June 5-9, will feature ultrabooks, smartphones, and e-reading and cloud technology.

The show is expected to attract more than 36,000 international buyers and generate US$28 billion in business, up from US$25 billion in 2011, the organizers estimated.

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Taipei, May 23 (CNA) HTC Corp. launched its first fourth-generation (4G) smartphone in Taiwan Wednesday, with local wireless broadband operators predicting that the high-speed handheld device will expand the pool of 4G subscribers in the country.

Featuring a 1.2 GHz processor and a 5 megapixel camera, the HTC EVO Design can run on both the current 3G networks and the faster Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) networks.

The 4-inch model is also HTC’s first smartphone to use the advanced in-cell touch screen, which can be made thinner and lighter than the more traditional on-cell screens because the touch sensors are actually placed inside color filters rather than on top of them.

“With this new HTC phone, we expect to push Taiwan’s wireless broadband market toward an era of higher speed,” K.C. Chu, Taiwan sales country manager for HTC, said at a product launch press conference.

The 4G-enabled EVO Design will go on sale around the country next month through 200 HTC stores as well as WiMAX operators Vee TIME Corp. and Global Mobile Corp., with a price tag of NT$13,900 (US$470), the company said.

Taiwan currently has six licensed WiMAX operators — Global Mobile, VMAX Telecom Co., Far EasTone Telecommunications Co., International Telecom Corp., Tatung InfoComm Co. and Vee TIME.

However, the six operators had tallied only 133,067 WiMAX subscribers as of December 2011 since acquiring licenses in 2007, casting a shadow over the future development of WiMAX wireless technology in Taiwan.

“There has been a lack of WiMAX terminal devices during the past two years. Our partnership with HTC is expected to boost the numbers of new subscribers and revenues,” said Vee TIME Chairman Richard Lai.

Lai projected that the number of Vee TIME users will double from 50,000 at present to 100,000 by the end of this year, while his company and Global Mobile will jointly purchase over 100,000 of the HTC EVO Design phones.

Rosemary Ho, chairwoman of Global Mobile, said she expects the number of her company’s users to grow from the current 120,000 to 250,000 by the end of this year thanks to the introduction of the HTC EVO Design.

User numbers could rise further to between 400,000 and 500,000 in 2013 as Global Mobile plans to spend more money on infrastructure utilization and smartphone subsidies, she said.

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Taipei, May 24 (CNA) The average download speed for cable broadband services in Taiwan improved from 8.2 megabits per second or 35th place in the world last year to 28.78 Mbps and fourth spot as of Monday, according to the results of a survey released Thursday.

According to the survey, conducted by Speedtest.net — a provider of broadband speed tests, other top performing countries in Asia included Singapore, which ranked fifth with a download speed reaching 28.31 Mbps, and eighth-placed South Korea with a speed of 27.65 Mbps.

Chunghwa Telecom Co., the largest telecommunications company in Taiwan, attributed Taiwan’s ranking improvement to efforts made by the country’s different providers to promote 50 Mbps speed among their broadband users.

The company said it has 568,000 customers using 50 Mbps services at the end of April this year, for a market share of 90 percent. The number was also an increase of over 30 percent compared with the 430,000 users recorded at the end of last year.

However, the survey also pointed out that the average upload speed for the cable broadband service was 4.89 Mbps, ranking 32nd in the world.

In March, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Kuan Bi-ling urged the National Communications Commission (NCC) to help telecom carriers narrow the gap between downloading and uploading speeds.

The general Internet infrastructure development in Taiwan still lags behind other countries in the region, such as South Korea, the NCC said.

NCC Chairwomen Su Herng promised that the government will aim to achieve several targets by 2015, such as access to a 100 Mbps cable broadband network for 80 percent of Taiwanese households, 6 million fiber broadband clients and 2 million wireless broadband clients.

In addition, Chunghwa Telecom is preparing to launch a 100/100Mbps broadband Internet data service and is promoting a 1GB bit per second high-speed fiber optic broadband network on a trial basis.

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