In a push to make Ultra HD TVs more prevalent in the market, TV vendors are aiming to push lower-priced solutions, which is starting to spur intensified price competition among vendors and related supply chains, according to Digitimes Research.Lower-priced 60Hz Ultra HD TVs were a major focus for vendors at CES 2015 while Full HD TVs were hardly mentioned, showing that vendors are increasingly focused on promoting Ultra HD going into 2015, which is expected to push down shipments of 120Hz Full HD TVs.Additionally, vendors are pushing forth with more integrated smart TV platforms that include Android TV. Major TV vendors such as Sony and Sharp have already begun to further integrate Android into their TVs while Samsung Electronics is expanding its Tizen services and LG Electronics its webOS platform.Opera TV is also furthering its way into the market and content streaming through platforms such as Netflix and Amazon will be an increasingly larger focus for vendors in upcoming years, added Digitimes Research.

There will be 38.525 million notebooks shipped globally during the first quarter of 2015, decreasing 16.4% on quarter and 2.4% on year, according to Digitimes Research.Lenovo will be the largest vendor accounting for 20.0% of shipments, followed by Hewlett-Packard with 19.5%, Dell 12.8%, Asustek Computer 10.9%, Acer 9.3%, Apple 8.6%, Toshiba 6%, Samsung Electronics 2.9% and Fujitsu 1.3%, Digitimes Research indicated.Taiwan-based ODMs together will ship 31.105 million notebooks in the quarter, slipping 15% on quarter and 7.8% on year and taking up 80.7% of the global total. Quanta Computer will be the largest ODM accounting for 33.7% of shipments, followed by Compal Electronics 31.2%, Wistron 15.6%, Pegatron 7.6% and Inventec 6.1%.

Monitors sized 28-inch were an increasingly larger focus for monitor vendors throughout 2014, with Samsung Electronics, IIYAMA, Lenovo and Acer at the forefront. Many of the units released were equipped with Ultra HD panels and twisted nematic (TN) technology, according to Digitimes Research.Units sized 24-inch on the other hand that featured Ultra HD panels came equipped with IPS technology, and vendors such as Dell are starting to release DisplayPort 1.2 60Hz units in 2015.Digitimes Research recently added the global average retail prices for 23- and 27-inch LCD monitors in December rose on month by 11.3% to US$276 and 9.2% to US$379, respectively, while those for 20- and 24-inch models have dropped 6.4% to US$132 and 1.2% to US$246. Pricing for 22-inch models remained unchanged.Pricing for 24-inch units dropped below that for 23-inch units for the first time since July of 2014 while the average retail pricing for 27-inch units has dropped from US$459 in June of 2014 to US$341 in October and later to US$379 in December.

In order to meet fast growing demand for TD-LTE, China Mobile is likely to kick off commercial deployment of Nanocell networks in the second half of 2015, according to Digitimes Research.While indoor DAS (distributed antenna systems) entail relatively large costs and complicated engineering and is therefore suitable for large commercial buildings and exhibition halls, Small Cell deployment is less costly and more flexible and so is suitable for home and office use, Digitimes Research indicated.China Mobile has set up about 650,000 TD-LTE base stations in main cities around China and is expected to focus TD-LTE infrastructure construction on indoor coverage by deploying Nanocell as soon as the second half of 2015. The company has finished trials in more than 10 cities and interoperability testing of Nanocell devices supplied by different vendors.

Qualcomm's top-notch product in 2015, the Snapdragon 810, has been rumored to have defects and see unstable mass production with some media even speculating that volume production for the application processor (AP) would not start until the second quarter of 2015. However, judging from LG's and Xiaomi's scheduled launches of their Snapdragon 810-based new products, as well as information gathered by Digitimes Research, the Snapdragon 810 has already entered mass production.The AP may have some defects but they have not stopped vendors from adopting it into their products. Compared to some other more serious problems that may affect Qualcomm's loing-term competitiveness, the Snapdragon issue is minor.The Snapdragon 810 is Qualcomm's first design adopting the ARM 64-bit big.LITTLE architecture into its high-end platform. With a 20nm manufacturing process, the AP's performance is expected to have a dramatic improvement from previous top-of-the-line solutions.Since the AP only uses ARM's standard architecture, the CPU part will lack uniqueness compared to other solutions and since competing APs using the same architecture are already available in the market, some market watchers are also skeptical about the Snapdragon's competitiveness.Digitimes Research believes Qualcomm, which has never adopted big.LITTLE architecture in its products prior to the Snapdragon 810, may be in disadvantages competing against Samsung Electronics over software optimization.Samsung's 64-bit big.LITTLE Exynos architecture has already entered the second generation. It has rich experience in the 20nm manufacturing process, and it plans to enter a 14nm manufacturing process in 2015. The Korean vendor, who has amassed a lot of experience in software/hardware integration for the big.LITTLE architecture, is expected to pose a great threat to its US-based competitor.Compared to Samsung's 20nm products, Qualcomm's device still has some integration advantages, but against China-based Hisilicon's 16nm or Samsung's 14nm integrated products, its advantages are much less obvious.Samsung's plan to integrate its APs with baseband chips in 2015 has prompted Qualcomm to enhance the Snapdragon 810's pairing baseband chip's specification from LTE to Cat.9, aiming to strengthen the AP's competiveness to prevent its competitors from catching up too quickly.As for the Snapdragon 810's issues, Qualcomm's clients are more concerned about the immaturity of the platform's base software, and the hardware issues are not too much of a problem for them.MediaTek's high-end AP the MT6595 in 2014 had an issue over DDR SDRAM's port physical layer (PHY), causing the AP's power consumption during idling to be over 30% higher than during standard operation and creating excessive heat. However, the product continues its mass production schedule as originally scheduled and Qualcomm is likely to follow suit. But problems with Qualcomm's AP are unlikely to be as bad as those of MediaTek.Digitimes Research believes the AP's defects should have been fixed by the time the next batch of devices are shipped.LG and Xiaomi were the earliest users of the Snapdragon 810. LG's products will enter mass production and hit store shelves by the end of January. Xiaomi's mass production schedule is a bit later than LG's, but the volume will be a lot more, showing Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810, despite defects, still are accepted by clients.

Global tablet shipments are estimated to drop 11.8% on year to reach 244 million units in 2015 as demand for high-end and entry-level tablets has both become saturated, while large-size smartphones and inexpensive notebooks are gradually taking demand away from the device, according to Digitimes Research's latest Special Report about the tablet industry.The 7-inch tablet segment is expected to see its shipment share drop from 51.3% in 2014 to 44.3% in 2015. Both the iPad mini series and 7-inch Wi-Fi-based entry-level Android tablets will see declining demand in 2015 and among the Android-based tablets, white-box models will see a worse drop than devices from brand vendors.As for other tablet sizes, the 10-inch and above segment is estimated to enjoy an on-year shipment growth of 20% in 2015 as vendors start seeking opportunities from the enterprise and specific industrial applications.Digitimes Research's Special Report on the global tablet industry estimates that iOS and Android will both see their shipment shares decline in 2015. Although Apple's 12.85-inch iPad will boost iOS' share in 2015, the growth will not be sufficient to offset the declines of the iPad and iPad mini.iOS-based tablet shipments are estimated to reach only 49.9 million units.Windows-based tablets will see a close to 50% on-year shipment growth in 2015 thanks to increasing shipments for high-end Intel Core M-based 2-in-1 devices, branded inexpensive tablets and high-price/performance-ratio white-box models.Digitimes Research believes that although Intel's mobile business has started devoting more efforts to smartphones, acquiring a firm position in the tablet industry is still the priority of the company and with help from products such as SoFIA and Core M series, Intel-based tablet shipments are expected to grow 50% on year to reach 40 million units in 2015.

Epistar has invested NT$825 million (US$25.94 million) to merge with TSMC Solid State Lighting (SSL), helping to enhance Epistar's capability in the lighting industry. Before the decision was made, many companies such as SemiLEDs and Advanced Optoelectronic Technology (AOT) had also been talking to TSMC SSL about merger.Digitimes Research believes the merger should benefit Epistar in strengthening its silicon substrate LED technologies to improve its competitiveness in the global market in the future.TSMC SSL only has five production machine sets, a limited contribution to Epistar's overall capacity, but TSMC SSL's manufacturing process technology will become a complement for Epistar, which mainly manufactures LED chips via sapphire substrates, since these machines are able to conduct middle-level packaging with technologies that cover upstream epitaxial manufacturing process for silicon substrate LEDs as well as supporting midstream's Phosphor on Die (PoD) and Epoxy Molding Compound (EMS) technologies.With Japan's Toshiba Semiconductor having significantly raised its silicon substrate LED capacity and Korea-based Samsung and LG aggressively developing 8-inch silicon substrate LED products using their existing advantages in semiconductor technologies to save costs, Epistar's merger with TSMC SSL is expected to greatly strengthen its silicon substrate LED technologies.Digitimes Research believes silicon substrate LED chips currently still have many issues such as weak yield rates and poor lattice constants and therefore the industry will still focus mainly on supplying sapphire substrate LED chips over the next several years. However, Epistar - as the leader of the global LED industry - will still need to have a diversified development of technologies, allowing it to defend against competition from competitors' silicon substrate technology and patents in the future.Before the merger, TSMC SSL had a talk to the Foxconn Group's subsidiary AOT about merger during the second half of 2014, but their talks ended with no result.Digitimes Research believes the failure was because AOT only has a capital of around NT$1.45 billion (TSMC SSL's net value was around NT$2 billion) and its business focus on mass production of LED packaging devices, which instead of merging TSMC SSL, the company should be able to achieve lower LED die costs by purchasing from outside suppliers as there is a sufficient global supply. Since the investment will only create limited value to AOT, the two's merger was not realized.

The production value of Taiwan's IC design industry reached NT$541.9 billion (US$16.98 billion) in 2014, representing an on-year growth of 14.8%, higher than the 11.7% growth recorded a year earlier, according to Digitimes Research.Shipments of smartphone solutions gained a boost in the third quarter of 2014, buoyed by the shift from 3G to 4G standards in China and smartphone replacement demand in emerging markets, including Africa, India and Russia.Shipments of TV chips by Novatek Microelectronics and Realtek Semiconductor posted strong gains in the third quarter and sales of STB chips were also brisk due to peak-season effects. Despite flat performance of related PC chips, the production value of the IC design industry rose 5.3% on quarter and 15% on year to NT$14.47 billion in the third quarter of 2014.Buoyed by demand for IC parts from the smartphone sectors in emerging markets and an easing of 8-inch wafer production capacity at wafer foundry houses, the production value of the industry climbed 12.1% on year to NT$140.9 billion in the fourth quarter although the amount was down 2.6% from the previous quarter, said Digitimes Research.

Following developments to push Ultra HD TVs in the market vendors have begun to promote curved units as well and aim to push the technology throughout 2015-2016. However, due to higher panel costs, limited market prospects and higher retail pricing, shipments during the time period will be limited, with only about 2.8-3 million curved LCD TV panels shipped in 2015, according to Digitimes Research.Panel pricing for curved units with similar specs to flat TV panels is still relatively more expensive. Currently, 55- and 65-inch curved LCD TV panels have 30% higher costs than flat TV panels, but overall are still cheaper than OLED TV panels.Due to high OLED material costs, in 2015 curved OLED TV sales are unlikely to break 800,000 as a result. However, as OLED TV panel costs drop consumers could see curved OLED TVs be the most widely accepted choice of curved TVs as early as 2018. OLED TVs do not require backlighting, unlike LCD TVs, and will have advantages in achieving curved, stylish features.Meanwhile, Digitimes Research also estimates that curved LCD TV shipments will exceed quantum dot LCD TV shipments in 2015.

Panasonic is showcasing an Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc player (BDP) prototype at CES 2014 and is the only exhibitor with such a device at the show. Digitimes Research believes Ultra HD BDPs will wait at least until the end of 2015 before hitting store shelves, but demand may pick up in 2016.Panasonic's staff at CES told Digitimes Research that the Ultra HD BDP supports content in Ultra HD resolution, 60Hz refresh rate and 10bit grayscale technology and is encoded via HEVC (H.265) codec. As for the storage media, the Ultra HD Blu-ray disc (BD) will have two formats: dual-layers (66GB) and 3-layers (100GB). Currently, Full HD BD has two formats: single-layer (25GB) and dual-layers (50GB).Compared to the pace of announcing BD support for the 3D format soon after arrival of 3D TVs, the Blu-ray Disc Association's (BDA) move to support Ultra HD content has been rather slow.The Panasonic staff confirmed that BDA will announce Ultra HD BD starndards in the second quarter, but the company has not yet had a firm schedule for Ultra-HD BDP's mass production and could launch the device at the end of 2015.With Ultra HD TVs' production approaching maturity, the birth of 60Hz SoC solutions in 2015 with the integration of HDMI 2.0 and HEVC, will prompt inexpensive Ultra HD TVs to appear in the market. The only obstacle to the Ultra HD TV market is the content.Digitimes Research believes more Ultra HD content should be available after the establishment of the Ultra HD BD standards since many digital movies are being filmed using Ultra HD resolution and movies filmed using traditional film can also be digitalized to Ultra HD quality.