Sales of smartphones in India in the second quarter in 2021 declined by 13% on quarter as the country battles through resurgences of COVID-19. Sales were still up on year; online stores were rapidly installed after the pandemic hit last year. As vaccines rolled out at the end of the second quarter, Chinese vendors turn more optimistic about sales in the coming months.
In light of the global semiconductor demand surges and chip companies looking to avoid the risks from the trade war and supply chain storage, the India government has recently provided new incentives to global semiconductor companies to set up fabs in the country, after a similar move failed a decade ago. But most of the global leading semiconductor companies still stay unresponsive due mainly to a lack of a complete ecosystem in South Asia.
The world's largest motorcycle manufacturer Hero MotoCorp is planning to expand its business into Battery as a Service (BaaS) and Vehicle as a Service (VaaS). According to Money Control's statistics, India-based Hero MotoCorp has 37% market share of India's gas-powered two-wheeler market.
The server industry is currently seeing a lead time of up to 52 weeks for its component deliveries with lingering shortages, which will not have a chance to improve until 2022, according to Mitac Holding president Billy Ho.
Since Narendra Modi became India's prime minister, India's economy has taken a new direction as the global supply chain goes through major changes. After half a century of globalization, world trade started to go the opposite with the pandemic accelerating the regionalization of the global supply chain.
India has seen local EMS providers step up investment in constructing production capacity for making notebooks and other IT harware, while the funds that local startups raised in first-half 2021 exceed the total for 2020.
India's Tata Motors have said it will have 10 new electric vehicles (EV) models by 2025, as business of passenger cars improves, according to a local report.
Authority in Vietnam's Bac Giang province is stepping up efforts to help Foxconn (Hon Hai) fully resume production at its three plants there in the wake of COVID sugres, according to a local eport.
Vietnam is looking to cooperate with India to promote ICT development, with both sides having held an online meeting recently over the matter, according to a report by VnEconomy.
India-based Reliance Industries reportedly is in talks with Google to jointly develop an ultra-low-priced smartphone, likely to be dubbed JioPhone Next, according to a local media report.
Social media sites in India are seeing shifts in use behaviors. A high court in India has ruled that Twitter has to take legal responsibility of its users' speeches, while the South Asian country's ban on TikTok has opened up opportunities for local video startups.
NXP Semiconductors and Jio Platforms (JPL), a subsidiary of Reliance, have announced a collaboration to implement a 5G NR O-RAN small cell solution that incorporates NXP's Layerscape family of multicore processors.
According to DIGITIMES' study on the data of publicly listed companies in the automotive and electronics industries, 95 out of the 100 largest firms are based in Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea. It can be foreseen that the process of ASEAN countries and South Asia transitioning to becoming the next production hub will be driven by Northeast Asian countries. Taiwan-based manufacturers with an OEM business focus that highlight the value of being "harmless" will be the best strategic partners to these countries on the way to starting their own high-tech industry development.
The India government has canceled exemption of tariffs on imported PCBs, base station controllers, modules and cable harness used in production of telecom and communication/networking equipment in its fiscal 2022 (April 2021-March 2022) budget plan, raising concerns it could increase production cost.
In an effort to reduce costs and meet emerging markets' demand, Samsung has chosen to place two thirds of its global production capacity at 360 million phones near Hanoi, Vietnam and one third in Noida, India. At the same time, a group of American brands led by Apple have asked their Taiwan-based OEMs to set up production facilities in India. Taiwan's three largest manufacturers Wistron, Pegatron and Foxconn all have production lines up and running in India. Before this, Taiwan-based notebook computer manufacturers had already moved their production to major ASEAN countries. It is a definite trend that manufacturers are relocating part of their production out of China into ASEAN countries and South Asia amid the changes in the US-China trade relations and the paradigm shift toward regional production.
