Samsung Electronics and China-based white-box handset makers will benefit from Microsoft Mobile's decision to phase out its feature phone business within one and a half years, Digitimes Research believes.Samsung and white-box handset makers have been competing for the orders left out by Microsoft Mobile since the third quarter of 2014, and Digitimes Research estimates that Microsoft Mobile has been shipping about 10-15 million feature phones a month in 2014.After recent visits to more than 10 white-box handset makers and related component suppliers in China, Digitimes Research estimates that white-box handset makers combined are still shipping about 35-40 million feature phones a month in the second half of 2014, and therefore those makers are able to take over the orders left by Microsoft.Although Samsung has shifted its focus to smartphones and tablets, it began to increase its handset component orders in the third quarter of 2014, also vying to land some windfall orders left over by Microsoft, while boosting sales of its handset business units.Since MediaTek and Spreadtrum Communications are the two major chipset suppliers for white-box feature phone makers, and Samsung also purchases feature phone solutions from Spreadtrum, the two solution vendors thus will also benefit from Microsoft Mobile's move, said Digitimes Research.

Enjoying growths in both tablet and notebook shipments, Lenovo is estimated to beat Samsung Electronics in mobile computing device shipments (notebooks and tablets) by about one million units in 2014 and become the second-largest mobile computing device brand vendor worldwide, only behind Apple.Despite difficulties to achieve further shipment growths for its tablet business, Lenovo with its advantage as the largest notebook brand vendor worldwide and aggressive promotions of its inexpensive and phone-enabled tablets is expected to achieve 50 million in total tablet and notebook shipments in 2015, widening its gap with Samsung to nine million units.Because tablet demand will weaken in 2015, Lenovo's and Samsung's strategies for the mobile computing device market are expected to focus on maintaining their tablet shipments. Digitimes Research believes Lenovo's shipments for tablets with phone functions to emerging markets in 2015 are expected to remain strong.Meanwhile, its Wi-Fi-based inexpensive tablets are expected to see a limited shipment decline in 2015 as the devices will cannabalize China's white-box tablets thanks to the brand vendor's advantages in the retail channel and its China-based supply chain to provide low-cost solutions. Lenovo's overall tablet shipments are expected to grow slightly on year to 11.7 million units in 2015.Samsung's aggressive expansion of its tablet product line in the first half of 2014 did not receive a good response from the market. Since the company is expected to turn conservative about its tablet business and place most of the resources on the smartphone business in 2015, Digitimes Research expects the Korea-based vendor's tablet shipments to drop to 36 million units in the year.As for the notebook business, after phasing out from the market in the second half of 2013, Samsung's shipment volume has dropped rapidly and is only expected to reach five million units in 2015.After becoming the largest notebook brand vendor in 2013, Lenovo has continued expanding its share in the notebook market and increasing its shipments. The China-based vendor is expected to ship 38 million notebooks in 2015.

Of the three largest China-based small- to medium-size TFT-LCD panel makers, BOE Technology will ship 50% of its smartphone panels to Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, 14.8% to China-based vendor Lenovo and 11.9% to China-based white-box vendors in 2015, Digitimes Research estimates.Tianma Micro-electronics will ship 21.8% and 17.7% of its smartphone panels to Huawei Device and Lenovo respectively, while InfoVision Optoelectronics (IVO) will rely on independent handset design houses for smartphone panel shipments.Producing smartphone panels at its 6G factory in northern China, BOE is competitive in terms of production efficiency and pricing but lags behind in production of LTPS TFT-LCD panels and this will be unfavorable for its competition for orders for high-end smartphone panels in 2015, Digitimes Research indicated. In contrast, Tianma is competitive in high-end smartphone panels due to relatively high yield rates in production of LTPS and on-cell applications.Huawei, Lenovo, Coolpad, ZTE, TCL Communication Technology and Xiaomi Technology - the six largest China-based smartphone vendors - are expected to mainly adopt panels produced by South Korea- and Japan-based makers for high-end models in 2015.BOE, Tianma and IVO are expected to focus competition in 2015 on orders for smartphone panels used in mid-range and entry-level models.

The number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices worldwide is estimated to rapidly grow from 900 million in 2009 to 26 billion in 2020, an increase by more than 30 times, driven by the prevalence of network infrastructure and continuing advances in sensor technology. Seeing the vast unprecedented opportunities, businesses around the globe are gearing up to grab a share of the market and trying to secure a leading position in the IoT industry.IoT, which has been receiving a great deal of attention from the global information technology industry, involves three major elements: a connecting element, a sensing element, and a processing unit. CEVA, holding the largest share of the DSP market, started its deployment in the IoT market at an early stage. With its keen sense of market needs, CEVA has established complete product lines for all three major IoT elements, which will help Taiwan-based corporations quickly penetrate into market segments such as smart home and wearable devices.Eran Briman, VP Marketing, CEVA, remarked, "IoT seeks to create higher values by enabling automatic transmission of data to back-end servers. As such, connecting elements are definitely the cores of IoT development. For example, the smart home cannot do without connection to various devices such as smartphones, wristbands, and monitoring devices, so wireless transmission elements including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and PLC are essential. CEVA is one of the few suppliers in the world that are capable of delivering total solutions."As opposed to other competitors who supply single-purpose solutions, CEVA offers a low power consumption core, CEVA-TeakLite-4 DSP, with a combination of highly reliable connection module devices for customers to choose among Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and PLC modules based on the market positions of their products so that the customer's design process can be simplified to accelerate time-to-market.Acquiring RivieraWaves to enhance total solutionsDespite its leadership in the DSP market for years, CEVA still strives to keep up with the changing market, to grasp the industry trend, and to devote resources to early development of advanced technologies. Eyeing the vast opportunities arising from IoT and the indispensable wireless transmission elements in IoT development, CEVA, having evaluated a number of factors, decided in July 2014 to acquire RivieraWaves, who had been a partner of CEVA for two years. In addition to helping CEVA further secure its industry leadership, the acquisition will also give CEVA's partners access to connection elements with high efficiency and low power consumption, enhancing their competitiveness in the US$300 billion IoT market.Founded in 2010, RivieraWaves is a startup IP provider focused on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies. In spite of its short history and a staff of only about 30 members, RivieraWaves' strong R&D capabilities have turned the company into a major communication IP supplier in the world in just a few years. RivieraWaves has signed over 30 licensing agreements with many customers using its IP. Many consumer electronic products run on RivieraWaves-licensed technologies, including the Xiaomi wristband that is hugely popular in China. It is evident that RivieraWaves is armed with outstanding wireless communication technologies.Briman explained, "CEVA does not limit product development to high performance, low power consumption DSP but rather we aim at being an all-round IP supplier. As for wireless communication solutions, we had cooperated with RivieraWaves for over two years when we began considering the possibility of bringing the cooperation to a closer level. After confirming there should be no problem in terms of corporate cultures for the two companies to merge, we decided to officially complete the merger in July 2014, which is believed to bring 20-25% revenue growth for CEVA."RivieraWaves' wireless communication solutions, already being widely used in smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices, will help CEVA expand shares in the markets of mobile devices and wearable devices, when combined with CEVA's DSP technology. Furthermore, as CEVA's DSP technology has been constantly receiving positive reviews in the fields of communication, speech, and visual applications, the merger will facilitate quick penetration into emerging markets, such as those for IoT, smart city, and smart home.No other IP supplier in the industry is capable of offering integrated software-hardware wireless transmission solutions without which a great deal of time and resources has to be spent on system integration, resulting in significant increases in R&D costs. Now with CEVA's solutions, partners only need to focus on developing applications software without having to worry about system integration.Robust CEVA-MM3101 targeting smart carsCEVA has been cultivating the market of image and computer vision solutions for many years. CEVA products are known to be easy to use and energy efficient and thus are very popular in the consumer market. Many safety systems, such as pedestrian detection systems, on vehicles of major automobile brands rely on CEVA solutions. CEVA-MM3101 launched in 2013 is especially designed for use in image enhancement and computer vision applications. It features hardware acceleration to ease processor load and thereby save precious power and computation resources.Compared to competitors' solutions, CEVA-MM3101 is more energy efficient and features over 750 most frequently used computer visual functions in the CEVA-CV database such as CV cores and algorithms used in mobile computing, PC, smart TV, NUI devices, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). These technologies are widely adopted in gesture recognition, facial recognition, and gaze detection.Briman pointed out, "Take the smart car designed for safe driving for example. Many cars will automatically measure the distance to the car in front or detect approaching pedestrians, and accordingly take control of the brake system to prevent accidents. CEVA-MM3101 is capable of quickly detecting images and thus is widely used in automobiles by partners. CEVA-MM3101 can instantly transmit the image back to the driver and can also work with a computer to let it judge whether to decelerate or initiate the brake."As IoT encompasses a wide variety of products, Briman suggested that Taiwan-based manufacturers start from smart watches, smart wristbands, and smart homes, where they may have a good chance of gaining market shares. Consumers are anticipating smart home applications as they will be able to connect with monitoring and security control devices to provide safer homes. This is a field that is promising great opportunities and therefore should not be overlooked. As to smart watches and smart wristbands, the consumer market has yet to embrace them with as much enthusiasm as expected because their development has still been limited by battery life. The industry will be able to more clearly see the trend going forward by observing the impact and changes to the wearable device market after the launch of Apple's iWatch next year.Eran Briman, VP Marketing, CEVA

Because of Hewlett-Packard's (HP) stable enterprise notebook orders and strong low-cost consumer notebook orders, both the global top-five brand vendors and top-three ODMs have seen their combined notebook shipments enjoy over 10% on-month growths in November, according to Digitimes Research.Notebook shipments saw an on-month decline in October, but a growth in November because brand vendors have adjusted their shipment strategies to minimize the impact from tablets and smartphones and try to get the most out of year-end holiday demand.HP ordered over four million notebooks in November with part of the shipments postponed from October. The volume saw an on-month growth surpassing 60% and was also an historic record for the company.HP's strong order growth helped Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics and Inventec all achieve significant increases in November shipments. Quanta and Compal both shipped over four million notebooks in the month, while Wistron and Pegatron Technology's shipments had limited on-month changes.Digitimes Research estimates that global tablet shipments will see almost no growth in 2014, and will decline over 10% in 2015 with the top-two vendors accounting for a major share of the market. At the same time, the notebook market will continue to suffer from a slight decline on year with top-five to -six brand vendors accounting for the major share.The two markets' current development and rankings are expected to push the seven major vendors: Apple, Lenovo, Samsung Electronics, HP, Asustek Computer, Dell and Acer, to re-adjust their product architectures and lineups, and their moves are expected to have a new influence on the mobile computing market (notebooks and tablets), which is expected to see shipments of over 350 million devices in 2015.

Following China-based chip maker Rockchip entering the supply chain for Chromebooks, additional China-based makers including Bitland and BYD are expected to further their presence in Chromebook supply chain in 2015 in order to meet upcoming demand from vendors as they expand their lineups, according to Digitimes Research.Samsung and Quanta have been major players in the Chromebook market, and Compal has seen orders from Lenovo and Acer. However, going into 2015 Google's strategy will include expanding its mix of suppliers, which means the market will witness increased influence from BYD, Bitland and Rockchip.Additionally, Bitland has already become a long-term notebook producer for Lenovo and is also a main motherboard OEM for the vendor, which is reflected in Bitland's efforts to establish facilities in Hefei, China specifically for Lenovo.Digitimes Research also noted Acer and Samsung are likely to start relying less on Quanta for Chromebook solutions as they expand their product mixes, but any significant changes are not likely to occur until 2016.

Based on LED epitaxial wafer makers' capacity expansion plans, there will be 252 MOCVD sets shipped globally in 2015, growing 10.5% on year and consisting of 186 sets to be added by China-based makers, 30 by Taiwan-based ones, 19 sets by Japan-based makers and 17 sets by South Korea-based players, according to Digitimes Research.China-based LED wafer makers will account for the largest proportion, 73.8%, of new MOCVD sets in 2015 because the China government will continue to offer subsidies for procuring LED wafer production equipment and China's global market share for LED chips used in low-price LED lighting is on the rise, Digitimes Research indicated. Sanan Optoelectronics, HC SemiTek, Elec-Tech International and Xiamen Changelight, the four largest China-based LED wafer makers, will add 50, 48, 20 and 50 MOCVD sets respectively in 2015.There will be a global stock of 2,937 MOCVD sets in operation or installed by the end of 2015, consisting of 1,019 sets (34.7%) belonging to China-based makers, 749 sets (25.5%) to Taiwan-based ones, 538 sets (18.3%) Japan-based makers, 417 sets (14.2%) South Korea-based makers, and 214 sets (7.3%) US- and Europe-based makers.

There will be 14 million PlayStation 4 (PS4) consoles shipped globally in 2015 to reach cumulative shipments of 31.5 million units and 11 million Xbox One consoles to reach 23.7 million units, according to Digitimes Research.Wii U shipments in 2015 will be two million units to reach cumulative shipments of 10.29 million falling behind those of PS4 and Xbox One.Xbox One shipments have been less-than-expected and Microsoft is taking actions to drop pricing for the device as part of its strategy to compete.PS4 meanwhile is extending its influence by offering PlayStation Vue services, of which Microsoft is showing signs of adopting similar services in the future, added Digitimes Research.

Thanks to Sony quitting the notebook market and Apple's price cuts, MacBook shipments in 2014 are expected to grow over 15% on year, the highest growth among the top-10 vendors. But Apple's iPad shipments are expected to see a decline in the year.In 2015, Digitimes Research estimates that MacBook shipments will grow further, but iPad shipments are expected to continue decreasing to reach around 55 million units. The iPad's shipment decline will result in Apple's overall shipments for the MacBook and iPad to drop from almost 90 million units in 2013 to around 80 million units in 2014 and 70 million units in 2015.Although Apple reportedly will launch a 12.9-inch iPad and add a new line of product using 12.2-inch Retina displays in 2015, the vendor's effort is unlikely to be able to stop its tablet shipments from seeing a major decline.Digitimes Research believes that the iPhone 6/6 Plus will continue to cannibalize iPad mini sales in 2015.

Global LTE users are expected to reach 445 million in 2014 and 1.466 billion in 2016, according to Digitimes Research.In the second half of 2014, 4G developments in China have taken off, spurring LTE developments in the end-user segment in addition to the business segment. Growth in the two segments will continue to be steady over the next 2-3 years.In the first half of 2014 South Korea LTE users made up 58.8% of all LTE mobile users in the market but as developments in China progressed, with telecom providers such as China Mobile providing more incentives for users, coupled with increased developments from Verizon Wireless, NTT docomo etc., global usage is on the rise and forecast to surpass one billion users by the end of 2016.Digitimes Research also said LTE equipment suppliers such as Huawei and ZTE are boosting efforts to expand in markets abroad, which have arguably been two of the biggest developments in 2014 that will further take shape in the future.