Prospects of market-niche medical display products are promising, buoyed by a number of factors, including aging global population, increasing chronic diseases, growing middle class in emerging markets, continued improving medical technology and, notably, that global medical demand is expected to grow at a pace higher than that of the global GDP growth, according to Digitimes Research

Google has been pushing sales of its Google Home devices to more markets and has also incorporated Google Assistant into the smart speaker as it is gearing up efforts to compete against Amazon in the smart home market, according to Digitimes Research

Having swung back to the growth track in 2017 after a three-year recession, global shipments of AIO (all-in-one) PCs are set to grow more robustly in 2018 and see its ratio to the global desktop PC shipments continue to rise, according to Digitimes Research

Shipments of handsets by Taiwan's brand vendors and ODMs totaled 17.8 million units in the first quarter of 2018, down 27.8% on quarter but up 17.5% on year, according to Digitimes Research

Google is now actively soliciting support for its ARCore and Google Lens platforms from handset vendors as it has taken the lesson from the ill-fated Tango platform which was discontinued due to increasing challenge from Apple's ARKit after it managed only to secure support from two handset makers and failed to entice significant inputs from application developers and to reach end consumers in scale, according to Digitimes Research

The output value of China's IC design industry sector is expected to exceed US$35 billion in 2018, driven by a combination of positive factors including continued growth in shipments of China-based smartphone vendors, rising demand for consumer electronics devices amid rampant IoT applications, and the appreciation of the Chinese currency, according to Digitimes Research

Taiwan's shipments of LCD monitors dropped 6.3% sequentially to below 20 million units in the first quarter of 2018 although the quarterly figures were higher than the levels seen a year earlier, according to Digitimes Research

Worldwide top-5 notebook brands saw their combined shipments drop around 30% sequentially in April primarily due to seasonal factors, but compared to the same month in 2017, the volumes went up 3%. Digitimes Research believes that the on-year increase was not a result of market recovery, but market uncertainties that had sent vendors' shipments fluctuating much more strongly than usual

Worldwide top-5 notebook brands saw their combined shipments drop around 30% sequentially in April primarily due to seasonal factors, but compared to the same month in 2017, the volumes went up 3%. Digitimes Research believes that the on-year increase was not a result of market recovery, but market uncertainties that had sent vendors' shipments fluctuating much more strongly than usual

Display products highlighted by China-based flat panel makers at the recently concluded China Information Technology Expo (CITE) show that most of China's panel suppliers are actively developing 18:9 all-screen and profile-cut panels in response to demand from the handset sector, the largest application market for small- to medium-size panels, Digitimes Research has found

Global server shipments (based on motherboards shipped) amounted to 3.4 million units in the first quarter of 2018, slightly down on quarter, but the shipments are expected to rise 9% sequentially in the second quarter, Digitimes Research estimates

Shipments of smartphone-use application processors in China are expected to increase 17% sequentially to 173.8 million units in the second quarter of 2018, Digitimes Research estimates