Global shipments for smartphone-use touch panels will reach 369.49 million units in second-quarter 2016, increasing 11% sequentially and 6.2% on year. Touch panel shipments for notebooks and 11-inch and above tablets will reach 6.339 million units, gowing 2.5% sequentially and 78.1% on year, according to Digitimes Research

China's tablet-use application processor (AP) shipments will increase 6% sequentially to 20.4 million units in the second quarter of 2016, according to Digitimes Research

China-based makers will ship an estimated 180.322 million touch panels in the second quarter of 2016, increasing 16.6% on quarter and 9.8% on year, according to Digitimes Research

The South Korea government-sponsored Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute estimates the production value for digital signage in South Korea in 2016 at KRW2.55 trillion (US$2.14 billion) and forecasts that the value will increase to KRW3.97 trillion in 2020, according to Digitimes Research

Narrow-Band IoT (Internet of Things) and LoRaWAN (long range wide area network) are seeing increased application for wireless long-distance communications at low power consumption, and thereby are likely to become two significantly important LPWAN (low-power wide-area network) standards, according to Digitimes Research

In the Japan market, chat robots, such as Pepper launched by SoftBank, are increasingly targeted for use by people suffering dementia, and Japan-based Fuji-Keizai predicted that demand for care-oriented chat robots in the Japan market will reach JPY1.7 billion (US$15.5 million) in 2021, 3.4 times the level in 2014, according to Digitimes Research

SoC-based graphics cards were the most widely adopted GPU product in 2015 with a market share of over 70%. CPUs with integrated GPUs had the second-largest share among GPU products, but its market share has been dropping over the past few years amid weakening demand in the mainstream PC market. Shipments of discrete graphics cards have also been falling in line with decreased PC sales, but the new architectures of AMD and Nvidia are expected to heat up related shipments in 2016. AMD's new architecture, which has advantages in supporting DirectX 12, may help the firm narrow its gap with Nvidia.

The landscape of the global OEM AIO (all-in-one) PC market will undergo a dramatic change in 2016 as number-two maker TPV-Inventa Technology begins making its gradual exit from the segment, according to Digitimes Research

Vizio could be credited as the most innovative LCD TV maker in terms of product planning in 2016, as it is the first vendor to remove ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) tuner from TV sets and replace it with built-in Chromecast (or SmartCast as Vizio named it) functionality and attach a tablet as the remote controller. Regarding to display technology, some of Vizio's entry-level models have come with 4K screens, and all of the vendor's high-end models have adopted local dimming technology to deliver HDR effectiveness

While a number of consumer virtual reality (VR) applications for games and video have been developed in 2016, the introduction of more head-mounted display (HMD) VR devices has also brought new aspects to the professional VR application market, according to Digitimes Research

The production value of South Korea's memory chip industry is expected to increase about 5% sequentially in the second quarter of 2016, according Digitimes Research. Demand for smartphones and other mobile devices is picking up, but chip prices continue to fall

Combined shipments of Wintel-based notebooks (excluding detachable models) from the top-five Wintel notebook vendors: Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asustek Computer and Acer declined 39% on month and 1% on year to 7.38 million units in April, according to data compiledby Digitimes Research