Apple has put two of its manufacturers on probation due to labor isssues, which may tighten supply of iPhones. DRAM spot maket prices have shot up recently as suppliers start scaling down their output. DRAM prices in the spot market are now 20% higher than in the contract market. PCB materials, such as copper foil, are set to see prices rally in 2021, as supply will be increasingly short of demand.iPhone supply may become tight due to labor issues at Apple production partners: Pressure is mounting to maintain steady supply of iPhone devices, including the iPhone 12 lineup, after Apple placed two of its phone assemblers on probation due to labor issues, according to industry sources.DRAM spot prices surge: Spot market prices for DRAM memory have surged recently and reached levels that are over 20% higher than contract market prices, according to sources at memory module houses.PCB materials prices set to rise in 2021: Prices for upstream PCB materials including copper foil, glass cloth and resin are set to rally in 2021 as supply is expected to be increasingly short of demand throughout the year, according to industry sources.

Heron Neutron Medical has invested NT$800 million (US$27.7 million) to set up an A-BNCT (accelerator-based boron neutron capture therapy) R&D and production base at Hsinchu Biomedical Science Park, northern TaiwanHeron president Leo Shen said an A-BNCT total therapeutic solution will be developed in line with technological development for recognizing tumors via AI-based image diagnosis, development of new targeted drugs containing boron and auxiliary apparatus in a bid to boost development of precision medicine in Taiwan.A-BNCT uses neutrons in combination with boron-containing drugs to minimize damage of normal cells and hike therapeutic effect in brain cancers, Shen indicated.Government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and National Tsing Hua University had cooperated in R&D of A-BNCT technology for years until Heron acquired the technology, Shen noted.Heron aims at starting clinical experiments at medical centers in Taiwan in 2023 and obtaining a license from Taiwan Food and Drug Administration in 2025, Shen indicated.Heron is a subsidiary of Hermes-Epitek, a semiconductor and optoelectronics equipment maker.Hermes-Epitek vice chairman CY Shu (right) and Heron Neutron Medical president Leo ShenPhoto: Monica Chen, Digitimes, December 2020

Makers in China usually have to reduce output during the Lunar New Year holiday. But they may have to reduce production earlier than usual for the upcoming holidays that officially start in February, as local government authorities are forcing migrant workers to go home early, advancing the period of massive migration for family reunions to reduce risks of COVID-19 infections. Notebook makers who expect orders from clients to remain robust during first-quarter 2021 are offering extra bonuses for workers willing to continue working during the upcoming holidays. The notebook ODMs want to make sure they have enough output during the holidays to fulfill clients' demand, but short supply of components, apart from labor shortage, may hinder their production. Components shortages have also been constraining the supply of SSDs although the market for NAND flash remains oversupplied.China labor shortage to worsen amid anti-virus measures ahead of holidays: Due to the approaching Lunar New Year holidays, some cities in China have introduced new precautionary measures to prevent a possible resurge of the coronavirus pandemic, which may worsen labor shortages in the country in January-February, according to industry sources.Notebook suppliers to keep more workers during upcoming holidays in China: As clients' notebook orders for the first quarter of 2021 are expected to remain strong, many in China's notebook upstream supply chain are set to offer extra bonuses to persuade workers to continue working during the Lunar New Year holidays in Fenruary 2021, according to industry sources.SSD supply constrained by chip shortages: The market for NAND flash memory remains oversupplied, but shortages of flash device controllers and passive components have constrained the supply of SSD and other related peripherals, according to industry sources.

US-based II-VI is expected to supply VCSEL chips, which will be used in ToF LiDAR scanners for the next-generation iPhones set to be released next year, to Apple. Meanwhile, Taiwan server makers' shipments are expected to be brisk in 2021 thanks to strong demand and new CPU platforms from Intel and AMD. Insufficient wafer foundry support has also benefited second-tier IC design houses and will boost their profitability in the fourth quarter of 2020.II-VI to enter supply chain for iPhones with LiDAR sensors, sources say: US-based II-VI is expected to enter the supply chain for Apple's next-generation iPhones by fabricating VCSEL chips for time-of-flight (ToF) LiDAR scanners, according to industry sources.Taiwan server makers upbeat about shipment prospects for 2021: Taiwan's server makers are generally upbeat about their shipment prospects for 2021 thanks mainly to strong demand for datacenter applications and server replacement boom to be driven by the launch of new x86 server processors probably in first-quarter next year, although the pandemic remains the largest variable that may affect their normal production and shipments, according to industry sources.Second-tier IC design houses to enjoy profit growth in 4Q20: Tight foundry capacity resulting in insufficient chip supplies and rising chip ASPs already buoyed Taiwan's first-tier fabless chipmakers' profits in the third quarter. Such scenario has started favoring smaller-scale fabless firms, particularly display driver IC suppliers, according to industry sources.

Combined sales of OLED panels by Samsung Display and LG Display (LGD) for small- to medium-size applications are expected to reach KRW9.6 trillion (US$9.4 billion) in the fourth quarter of 2020, up 46.2% sequentially and 31.2% on year, according to an estimate by Digitimes Research.The optimistic prospects come after both firms experienced increased revenues and shipments for small- to medium-size OLED panels in the previous quarter, driven by growing demand from the smartphone and wearable sectors.Demand for OLED panels from the smartphone sector has rebounded as the pandemic-induced impacts on the handset supply chain have eased, while the launch of Apple's all OLED iPhone 12 lineup has encouraged other handset brands to also adopt OLED panels for their mid-range to high-end models, Digitimes Research said.In 2021, OLED-based models are expected to account for 40% of global smartphone shipments, said Digitimes Research. Besides, demand for OLED panels for Apple Watch devices is likely to double in the coming year.To cash in on increasing demand, both LGD and Japan Display (JDI) have accelerated their expansion projects for ramping up OLED panels.As Samsung Electronics has already launched three foldable smartphones built using flexible OLED panels, Digitimes Research believes that Apple will likely step into the foldable smartphone sector in 2022, furthering demand for flexible OLED displays.In response to increasing demand, Samsung Display has expanded its monthly flexible OLED module capacity to 900,000 units in the second half of 2020.

The LCD panel sector has seen tight supply, thanks to strong demand for applications supporting stay-at-home needs in the wake of the pandemic. But the LCD shortage has worsened recently because of production disruptions at suppliers, according to AUO chairman Pauel Peng. The stay-at-home needs have also been fueling notebook sales, with the global top-5 brand vendors' combined shipments staying at high levels in November. In the memory sector, DRAM inventory has dropped to low levels in end markets, with spot DRAM prices expected to start rising later this month.LCD panel shortage worsening, says AUO chairman: The shortage of LCD panels has worsend after a strong earthquake struck northeastern Taiwan and a power outage hit glass substate supplier Nippon Electric Glass (NEG) in Japan recently, according to Paul Peng, chairman of AU Optronics (AUO).Global top-5 brands see combined shipments reach second highest level in November: The global top-5 brands' combined notebook shipments in November 2020 remained robust, reaching the second highest-ever monthly level, thanks to strong sales in Europe and North America amid the resurging coronavirus pandemic, according to Digitimes Research's latest figures from the Notebook Tracker.DRAM spot prices to start rising later in December: DRAM spot prices will start rising in the second half of December, with the rally set to persist through January 2021, according to industry sources.

The global top-5 brands' combined notebook shipments in November 2020 remained robust, reaching the second highest-ever monthly level, thanks to strong sales in Europe and North America amid the resurging coronavirus pandemic, according to Digitimes Research's latest figures from the Notebook Tracker.The top-5 vendors' combined shipments reached the highest-ever monthly level in October.Both Hewlett-Packard's (HP) enterprise and consumer notebook shipments went down from a month ago in November. Lenovo saw its November shipments pick up on month due to increased Chromebook shipments by its Japanese sub-brands and ramp-ups in own-brand Chromebook supplied by its Chinese and Taiwanese ODMs, Digitimes Research's figures show.Dell, which enjoyed major education procurement orders and built up a high comparison base in October, witnessed a sharp on-month decline in November shipments.The top-3 ODMs together saw shipments dip 4% on month in November. Quanta Computer's shipments further increased in the month to reach a new record. Compal Electronics saw a significant drop in November shipments due to weaker-than-expected orders from Dell.

The key to whether something sells or not is not the superiority of the product technology, but whether consumers are willing to pay for it. That's a key message Laura Huang, associate professor of Harvard Business School, delivered at SparkLabs Taipei Demo Day 4 held recently.Digitimes later talked to Huang - who was named one of the 40 Best Business School Professors Under the Age of 40 by Poets & Quants - about the skills of perception that enterprises need to cultivate and what it takes for startups to succeed.Q: Why did you attend the SparkLabs Taipei Demo Day 4? Was it because of the new research you are currently doing?A: Edgar (Edgar Chiu, managing partner of SparkLabs Taipei) and I had mutual friends, which is how we got to know each other several years ago. When Edgar was in Boston last year, he invited me to attend this year's Demo Day, hoping that I could share some insights to startup founders. My research focuses on how investors make decisions to invest in early-stage startups, analyzing the soft variables, such as gut feeling and perception, and the hard variables, such as financials, competitors, and scalability. My research seeks to quantify the soft factors that investors rely on to help understand how these variables relate to decision making. I'm continuing to extend this research and am currently also focusing on the topic of mindset, which I hope will provide insight to Taiwanese companies.In many cases, the key to success is not the superiority of a product's specifications and features, but the willingness of consumers to buy it. It is certainly possible to develop the most powerful product, but if the price is too high or those who can afford it do not want all the features, then the value of the product is not recognized.In fact, many products that have achieved leadership positions in the marketplace are not the most powerful. As I mentioned in my book, "Edge: Turning Adversity to Advantage," the successful businessperson must be able to recognize an adverse market situation, such as economic recessions, and leverage the situation to their advantage. These advantages are of your own making. Therefore, success cannot be achieved by just putting your head down and working hard behind closed doors - something that the Taiwanese are exceptional at and very proud of.Taiwanese are taught from a very young age to "work hard" and "be good," which usually means to not have too many opinions. Often, the Taiwanese put double the effort into their work just to get the same results. The main theme of my research explains that the key to success is not hard work, but to understand what people value and how they perceive you. This gives you a chance to flip any adversity to your advantage. If you can get twice the results with half the effort, why spend twice the effort to get the same results? Isn't the growth rate of 10X or 100X what startup companies are looking for?I have this understanding of Taiwanese culture because my parents taught me these values when I was a kid. However, growing up in the United States, I found Taiwanese values were very different than American values, which became a quick source of frustration for me. Both are valuable, and one is not better than the other. In American culture, self-awareness and social awareness are key, and you can't live in your own world if you want to be successful. You have to be able to understand others and know how others see you. There are dotted lines between these points, i.e., interpersonal relationships.By gaining a deeper understanding of how others perceive us and subtly subverting these views and stereotypes, we can create new advantages out of the limitations and obstacles created by an imperfect system. This is especially important for startups because the focus is not solely on products and services. In business school, we spend 80% of our time learning about marketing, products and services, financial accounting, competition, and so on, but spend very little time discussing people and perceptions. However, when we graduate and go on to start our own businesses, we actually spend 80% of our time discussing people, including customers, partners, and suppliers, to determine whether or not a product can be made and sold. There's a clear disconnect between what we learn in the classroom and what we actually do in the professional workplace. In Taiwan, I would like to see a transformation in the way we think about business education and the reality of the startup workspace as part of the new innovation ecosystem.Companies that embrace the mentality of believing superior technologies are key to success are prone to misinterpret results when doing market research. They often ask engineers to raise the bar for their products by focusing on pixels, lens resolution, and so on. However, I always tell my students that it is important to get customers' real perception of your product or service: you can't just rely on the data. For example, if you ask a consumer, "If my phone can take 30 photos or 99 photos in a row per second, which one would you prefer?" the consumer will most likely say 99 shots without having any idea of what that actually means. Then, the company will turn around and asks their product engineers to make a product that can take 99 shots without taking the time to see how the consumer will use the finished product. This market research does nothing to help the company understand what their consumers care about the most or what they want to achieve with the product. Companies rarely stop and consider if they really need that 99-shot series, or does the consumer actually care more about getting the best visual effect, regardless of how many shots can be taken? The factors that make consumers want to buy go far beyond technical specifications. We spend so much energy on specifications that we neglect the market feedback and user experience that entrepreneurs need to pay the most attention to, and how that feeds back into the design of our products and services.As we engage more with AI, big data, robots, AR and VR, it is easy to fall into the trap of technology and not realize it. Behind every VR goggle and IoT device, there is a user experience. "People" are the key, not technologies.Q: We have heard of examples of large corporations partnered with new startups in search of new applications for their existing products. What advice would you give to corporate venture capital (CVC)?A: CVC accelerators have a 95% failure rate because they don't use the right approach. These accelerators are usually well-funded, and they choose new ventures by cherry-picking: choosing Company A for its intellectual property (IP), Company B for its team's R&D capabilities, and Company C for a certain quality, and then they buy them all. This is because accelerators thought it would be more efficient to internalize innovation. They thought the startups, which have a certain understanding of their company's technology, would have a better chance of success if they used the company's technology and resources as a basis for their R&D. However, what they didn't see was that the startups they bought, such as the startups acquired by Google and Microsoft, recognized this cherry-picking strategy and tried to figure out what the big firms wanted, creating the product accordingly. When outsiders saw what they were doing, they thought it was uninspiring and not innovative because the product was often too similar to the parent company's already existing product. I believe that the struggle that many startups experience can actually be beneficial and lead them to making a product that will attract the most consumers in the market.This is because the products that come out of these in-house ventures will ultimately be tested in the marketplace. This is not to say that all CVCs are not effective, but they need to be designed carefully so that they don't end up catering to parent company's solutions. CVC accelerators are usually the latter, but innovation is often about trying to find a solution to a problem by drawing from multiple solutions that already exist, not the other way around. Innovation often starts with a technology application, and then someone goes back to find a problem and develop its solution.Q: Perhaps large corporations with a lot of past successes also need some level of reset and "learning to unlearn"? The pandemic has brought about many changes, perhaps their perceived successes will become a burden in the future?A: They don't need to unlearn everything, but they do need to know exactly what they need to "prune." This pruning is especially difficult for large companies because they are already successful, and it seems unreasonable for them to alter business practices that have already reaped rewards. While it's important to help them retain their core strengths, they must also continue to push innovation and learn new skills. As I said at Demo Day 4, large companies can be compared to trees in the sense that when they get to a certain size, they must be pruned in order to continue to grow. The hardest part stems from these companies knowing they need to prune, but not understanding which areas to focus on or what new areas to explore.Q: You strongly emphasize the need for companies to be sensitive to the "perception" of others. How do you go about strengthening that sensitivity?A: Perception is actually a skill. If you want to grow your muscle, you need to do certain trainings. I spend almost half of my book talking about how to develop these skills.Don't we spend our entire lives communicating with others in hopes that they will understand us, agree with us, and ultimately do what we want them to do? It is important to understand why, when, and under what circumstances the other person will say "no" to us. So in class, I have my students do an exercise: for a week, they need to have 10 people in 10 different situations say no to them. And for each situation, they have to write a short paragraph describing the situation and present in class.Interestingly, my students found that some people have a fixed communication pattern: when communication styles like tone of voice, words, and facial expressions changed in a certain way, the other person would say "no." They began to observe phenomena that they had previously taken for granted. It's important to train yourself to be aware of how you communicate in order to get your desired outcome. If you go directly to a person and say, "You are not giving me a promotion because I'm a woman," it is natural for them to immediately deny that accusation, even if it's true. When you understand others' perceptions of you, then you can flip any misconceptions to highlight your true talents and strengths, and have deeper and richer conversations and interactions with people.This ability is especially important for startups. Startups need to understand how their different customers, partners and investors perceive them so that they can understand what these different target audiences expect from them. This understanding enables startups to more effectively communicate their message and product in different ways to appeal to their various stakeholders. For example, you don't need to tell an investor a bunch of information about product specifications because they are more interested in learning about the business model. Contrastingly, consumers are quite interested in these product specifications, such as how the product works and pricing. Using your perception skills, you can better understand your different target audiences and communicate more effectively to get more done with less effort.(Editor's note: The Women in Venture series is a collaboration with Digitimes' strategic partner Anchor Taiwan, a platform to connect the world with Taiwan focusing on corporate innovation and cross-border expansion. The Women in Venture Roundtable is a network of 80+ female investors and bi-monthly sessions featuring world-class guest speakers. More info: Anchor Taiwan. For the podcast, see Spotify, Apple Podcast or Soundcloud: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Dy6TKKLIazz8oaCW0oiiE.)Laura Huang, associate professor at Harvard Business SchoolPhoto: Shihmin Fu, Digitimes, November 2020

Foxconn Technology Group (Hon Hai Precision Industry) chairman Young-Way Liu has pointed out that quantum computing is attracting more global attention, and the next three to five years would be a crucial period for Taiwanese ICT firms to establish a meaningful presence in this new trend.With the global ICT industry ready to embrace a new era, Taiwan's opportunity to make a headstart in quantum technology will lie in the next 3-5 years, Liu said at a quantum technology forum held in Taipei recently.Taiwan's experience from the semiconductor industry accumulated over the years and a large number of talent developing applications will arm Taiwan with advantages in quantum computing research, Liu noted.A new technology's development always begins with a theory, and then proceeds to engineering before application. At the moment, the quantum technology development is already at the engineering stage, Liu said.With quantum technologies already in engineering development, their applications will come next. The key goal of Taiwan's ICT industry is to catch up at the stage of application and at the current stage of engineering development, he said.Among research centers under Foxconn's Hon Hai Research Institute, two of them are related to quantum technology studies - one focusing on quantum computing and the other conducting semiconductor research, Liu said.Foxconn has also partnered with universities and high schools in Taiwan to provide quantum computing courses, Liu added.Foxconn chairman Young-Way LiuPhoto: Michael Lee, Digitimes, December 2020

SMIC's co-CEO Mong-song Liang has submitted his resignation over a management adjustment. A disgruntled Liang, the R&D leader of China's number-one foundry house, says in his letter of resignation that he believes he is no longer trusted by the company. TSMC chaiman Mark Liu has dismissed speculation that the foundry house has seen clients reduce orders. He maintains that 5nm wafer shipments will drive the company's sales growth in 2021. Tight foundry capacity supply is pushing up production costs at IC vendors. Some NAND flash controller suppliers are now mulling raising prices for their solutions in first-quarter 2021.SMIC co-CEO Liang reportedly offers to resign: Mong-song Liang has submitted his resignation to SMIC's board of directors after the China-based foundry decided to bring back Shang-yi Chiang to its management, according to sources familiar with the matter.No cutback in customer orders, says TSMC chairman: TSMC chairman Mark Liu has dismissed recent speculation that claimed a cutback in 5nm chip orders from Apple would drag down the foundry's 5nm process capacity utilization to 80% in the first half of 2021.NAND flash controller suppliers mull price hike: NAND flash device controller suppliers including Phison Electronics and Silicon Motion Technology have stopped offering quotes for new orders, and are mulling a 10-15% price hike in the first quarter of 2021, according to industry sources.