Taiwan WLAN sector – 4Q 2005

The growing penetration of built-in wireless LAN (WLAN) capability in notebooks, together with the absence of a new standard, jointly constrained the growth of WLAN equipment shipments below the more than 100% on-year growth rate that Taiwan witnessed in 2004. DigiTimes Research estimates that the annual shipment of network interface cards (NICs) from Taiwan grew 68% on-year to 90.7 million units in 2005, while shipments of wireless routers grew 66% on-year to 26.1 million units, thanks to year-end demand.