Micron is stepping up expansions of its production capacity, with plans to install EUV tools at its Taiwan fabs in 2024. In China, smartphone shipments to the domestic market slipped 5.4% in September, with local brands accounting for over 90% of the shipments. And supply side issues, such as component shortages, may hinder 5G smartphone shipment growth globally in 2022.

Vietnam expects digital economy to reach 20% of GDP by 2025 and 30% by 2030, prime minister Pham Minh Chinh said at the Digital World 2021 exhibition, cohosted by the government of Vietnam and International Telecommunication Union (ITU), according to Vietnamese-language news outlet Youth Newspaper.

As a co-inventor of the technology that powers hundreds of millions of units of Kindle and an inductee of the National Inventor Hall of Fame in America, Barrett Comiskey, founder and CEO of Migo, could have retired young and enjoyed a comfortable life after selling E-Ink, his first company. However, it did not take long for him to embark on another innovation journey to solve the same problem that Google Loon and low-earth orbit satellite companies are trying to solve.

India's three major telecommunication companies account for 90% of the business opportunities. Vodafone's market share is declining. The fastest-growing player is Reliance Jio, which accumulates service users through a successful marketing ploy of low-cost mobile phones. Its current market share in India's telecommunication market has reached 37% with 436 million users.

Ather Energy and Tata Motors are making substantial investments in electric vehicle businesses, but India's car production and sales both decreased in September compared to the same month in 2020.

Established in Bangkok, Thailand in 1967, Charoong Thai Wire & Cable (CTW) is the largest telecommunication cable manufacturer in Thailand and a subsidiary of Pacific Electric Wire and Cable.

As cloud and 5G applications continue to grow, the demand for data centers remains high, opening up opportunities for related supply chains such as connectors.

India's huge population and potential economic growth have attracted investments from foreign IT enterprises, such as Samsung, Netflix, and Oppo, while local large enterprise groups such as Tata and Reliance have been pushing for innovations across industries in India with increasing investments as well.

Although materials in the fourth quarter are still in short supply, companies are starting to get a better handle on the pace of supply and demand and expect operations to improve, according to the network communications supply chain. However, what impact, if any, the power shortage in China will have is still uncertain.

Development of low and medium Earth orbit satellites is expected to bring many potential business opportunities for Taiwan-based communication equipment makers, according to Pegatron chairman TH Tung.

With the standards for the 5G protocols largely established, wireless communication providers in the US and Korea started to offer the service in select major cities starting third-quarter 2019. Not to fall behind, Taiwan also completed the bidding for its 5G bandwidths towards the end of 2019 and started offering services during second-quarter 2020, marking Taiwan among one of the fewer countries in the world currently capable of sustaining 5G communications. 5G communication has the advantage of higher data throughput, wider bandwidths, lower latencies, and can support much higher volume of connections. However, 5G networks require more base stations in a given area to provide users good coverages and services. Consequently, this has led to a rush from telecommunication companies investing in the deployments of the base stations to expedite the availability of the 5G networks.

It is well known that highways are the lifeblood of metropolitan transportation. To increase the speed of highways and the convenience of road users, Taiwan entrusted Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection (FETC), a subsidiary of the Far Eastern Group, with the operation of the nation's highway electronic toll collection (ETC) system through a build-operate-transfer (BOT) model in 2004. More commonly known as just the "ETC" in Taiwan, the system has weathered through its early difficulties and controversies 17 years ago to become a model to replicate for countries around the globe, says FETC International vice president and chief technology officer, Richard Wu. FETC International is now planning to share its successful ETC model and experience in Taiwan to foreign markets.

AMD and MediaTek are said to be seeking to form a joint venture that will develop notebook applications integrating Wi-Fi, 5G and high-transmission technologies. Other chip vendors in Taiwan are also hoping MediaTek to play a leading role in the local supply chain to compete with Qualcomm in the mmWave 5G market. In the EV market, Thailand has ambitious goals for its car manufacturing sector.

NAND flash pices may stablize in 2022, but supply is likely to turn tight in the second half of next year, according to Silicon Motion's president. Meanwhile, Chinese memory maker YMTC is ready to volume produce 128-layer QLC NAND flash, initially targeting consumer SSDs. And in a recent interview by DIGITIMES, Harish Krishnaswamy, CTO and co-founder of MixComm, and Marzieh Veyseh, CTO/CPO and co-founder of SiTune, talked about their views on the development of mmWave market, latest chip crunch, and the Satcom market opportunities.

MixComm, a provider of millimeter-wave (mmWave) and front-end solutions for 5G and Satcom applications, has recently announced a collaboration with SiTune, an innovator of multiple generations of RF and mixed-signal system on a chip, to develop 5G mmWave reference designs. Both companies have been recognized for their high-performance energy-efficient 5G solutions.

Since the 1970s, Taiwan and South Korea have been parallelly developing semiconductor and new-geneation IT industries. The national conditions and industrial strength of the two countries are very similar. During the Cold War, Taiwan and South Korea were part of the first island chain facing the communist world. Now the US and China are rivals that compete head to head with not only weaponry, but also the strength of the technology industry, the most representative of which is the semiconductor industry and the ubiquitous supply chain. About 60% of Taiwan's and Korea's semiconductor exports go to China. In 2020, China imported as much as US$350 billion of semiconductors, with about half of them from Taiwan and South Korea. Taiwan and South Korea both export enormously to China on the one hand, and vie for the industry leadership position on the other. South Korea specializes in memory, but Taiwan's industry structure is more diverse: wafer foundry, IC design, packaging and testing. Taiwan and South Korea dislike each other but also rely on each other.

In a recent interview by DIGITIMES Etron chairman Nicky Lu explains why monolithic/heterogeneous integration is important to the future of the semiconductor industry. Meanwhile Apple has increased the storage capacity of its new iPhone 13 series to up to 1TB, and memory makers believe this will prompt other smartphone brands to follow suit and equip their flagship devices with the same internal storage capacity. Backend service providers believe Apple's new iPad mini 6 will generate strong orders for 5G RF modules.

Smartphone users in India acknowledge that 5G will bring more possibilities, including more IoT appliances at home, higher resolution in graphics, and higher speed in download, a CMR survey shows.

Taiwan's networking device makers see clear order visibility through the first half of 2022, thanks to demand from the stay-at-home activities and companies whose employees are retruning to offices. Cooling module suppliers believe that vapor chambers, now found mostly in notebooks, will become a key component for smartphones. But handset demand remains weak, reportedly prompting CIS vendor OmniVision to cut back orders for IC manufacturing in Taiwan.

The rise of the global touchless economy has created new opportunities for 5G applications. Now no longer limited to mobile phones, new types of 5G data link endpoint devices are being developed.

While commercial 5G operations may have only just begun and its actual use in the general consumer market may still be limited, the industry is already thinking ahead to 6G.

Innovative new business models by SpaceX and Blue Origin have reduced the costs of space tourism and satellite launches, creating a gradual paradigm shift in the new space industry supply chain.

Taiwan's National Communications Commission (NCC) is asking Far EasTone (FET) and Asia Pacific Telecom (APT) to accelerate the construction of 5G base stations to stimulate user growth.

Taiwan Star Telecom (T Star) announced on Aug 30 its collaboration with iClick to integrate T Star's core network with iClick's virtual reality (VR) technology. The collaboration aims to create immersive 5G experiences to seize business opportunities in the smart tourism market.

Ho Chi Minh Export-processing Zone Authority (HEPZA) has allowed factory workers to live on site, starting on Aug 23, to keep operations going. Factories that fail to follow the restrictions will have to shut down, according to Vietnam Insider.