December average retail price for 7W LED light bulbs (equivalent to 40W incandescent ones) in the China market decreased by 8.7% on month to CNY35.7 (US$5.8), while that for 9W models (equivalent to 60W incandescent ones) decreased by 9.1% to CNY37.1, according to Digitimes Research.Average retail prices for 40W- and 60W-equivalent LED light bulbs in the Japan market in December stood at JPY1,698 (US$14.0) and JPY3,265 respectively, with the former rising by 2.6% on month and the latter by 3.9%, Digitimes Research indicated.December average retail prices for 40W- and 60W-equivalent LED light bulbs in other markets were: KRW11,402 (US$10.2, up 0.3% on month) and KRW14,361 (down 0.3%) in South Korea; US$17.9 (down 3.8%) and US$19.6 (down 4.4%) in the US; EUR9.5 (US$11.6, up 1.1%) and EUR14.1 (down 2.1%) in Europe.LG Electronics 40W-equivalent LED light bulbs for sale in the Europe market and Philips 60W-equivalent models in the South Korea market had the highest average lumen-price ratios of 81.6lm/US$ and 96.2lm/US$ respectively in December. In terms of luminous efficiency, Toshiba 40W- and 60-equivalent LED light bulbs available in the Japan market had the highest average levels of 81.1lm/W and 104.1lm/W respectively.

Observing major LCD TV brand vendors' strategies for 2015, Google's Android TV has become the official platform for Sony's and Sharp's smart TVs, but vendors such as Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and Panasonic are still resisting Android, and bent on using their in-house developed platforms to carve out their own territories in the market.During their pre-show press conferences for CES 2015, Sony and Sharp have respectively noted that Android TV will be fully adopted into their mid-range and high-end product lines in 2015, a strong advance for Google as its previous-generation Google TV platform was only available in Sony and LG Electronics' entry-level TVs.Their move also indicates that the two Japan-based TV vendors, whose market shares have been declining in the past few years, have formed a strategic alliance over their smart TV platform's development, which is expected to help strengthen the Android TV camp.Other major TV brand vendors have mostly announced their own next-generation smart TV platforms during CES 2015 such as Samsung Electronics' Tizen, LG's WebOS 2.0 and Panasonic's Firefox.With its smartphone business having difficulties breaking from the Android control, Samsung has decided to adopt its in-house developed Tizen platform into all its smart TVs for 2015, hoping to establish an ecosystem strong enough to compete with Android.LG will upgrade WebOS to version 2.0 and continue to promote the platform's easy-to-control characteristics. LG is also looking to expand WebOS' applications and is eyeing products such as digital signage and hotel's TV systems as its next targets.Panasonic announced its partnership with Firefox in 2014 and has revealed that it will put Firefox OS into its TV product lines for 2015. Digitimes Research believes Firefox OS may not help Panasonic much in its bid to expand in the TV market, but it means Panasonic is not ready to give in to Google yet.

Despite the fact that Russia's IT market has been greatly impacted by the fast depreciation of the country's currency, Digitimes Research expects demand for LTE tablets from Russia to continue growing in 2015 due to the rise of its regional brand vendors and strong consumer demand for high price/performance-ratio products.During recent visits to firms in China's supply chain, Digitimes Research discovered that China's white-box makers have been accelerating their shipments of LTE-based tablets to Russia's regional brand vendors for replacement of 3G models.Such shipments are expected to help the white-box players avoid competition from vendors of inexpensive tablets with phone functions and achieve better profits, as well as more market space for development.Demand for phone-enabled tablets started emerging in Russia in 2011. Although the country's LTE communication service users only account for 1.5% of overall users, the country was still one of the top-10 LTE markets worldwide in 2013.J'son & Partner research firm previously estimated that Russia had about 14% of its tablet shipments in the first quarter of 2014 being LTE-based models and sales for LTE-based tablets are estimated to have reached 1.7 million units in 2014, accounting for over 20% of Russia's overall tablet sales.Digitimes Research expects LTE-ready models to account for 30% of Russia's overall tablet shipments in 2015.

To find new outlets for its GPU business, Nvidia has started licensing its GPU architecture to other application processor (AP) designers. Kepler was the first GPU platform Nvidia offered for licensing and its latest-generation Maxwell will also become available for licensing later.Digitimes Research believes Nvidia is looking to rely on the licensing business and its GPU patents to penetrate into the mobile GPU market where ARM and Qualcomm combine for an almost 70% share.Although Nvidia started its GPU architecture licensing business in June 2013, the company so far has not yet obtained any orders because Kepler's size occupies a large portion of APs' space, causing a rather weak performance per area. In addition to size, potential clients have been deterred by a lack of flexibility in determining where the GPU can be placed.Nvidia's upcoming Maxwell has a performance per area about 160% better than Kepler and has a higher flexibility in the location of the GPU, allowing clients to easily achieve their desired performance/cost balances. Therefore, Digitimes Research believes Nvidia's GPU licensing business may not actually start contributing revenues until the Maxwell architecture's release.Meanwhile, Nvidia has filed lawsuits against Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm for infringing its GPU patents. Nvidia has over 7,000 GPU patents and is suing the two firms for patents related to some basic technologies such as object texture, lighting, shading, GPGPU, vertex operator. Samsung Electronics is being sued for using ARM's Mali GPU architecture.The patent lawsuits are a part of Nvidia's patent licensing plan. And if Nvidia prevails in the patent war, clients should be more willingly to use Nvidia's GPUs.

TV vendors will focus on larger-size, higher-resolution units, namely 40-inch and above size TVs. Ultra HD resolution, wide color gamut, OLED and quantum dot (QD) will be in increasing demand in mature markets while Full HD TVs will continue to grow in emerging markets.The global TV market is set to show slight growth but competition will be on the rise. Creating improved ecosystems through smart TVs and content providers in addition to more comprehensive supply chains will help vendors and related supply chains stay profitable, especially as the TV industry in China continues to flourish.It is not improbable that within 1-2 years vendors will start offering TVs for little or no cost as long as there are signed contracts with content providers. Mobile device vendors have already started in this direction and TVs will follow suit as consumers become bogged down with too many choices and as vendors are faced with too much competition. Therefore, TV vendors should look to expanding their value-added characteristics through services, create experiences for consumers rather than promoting products and push forth cooperation with their ecosystems to bring about mutual benefit for everyone in the industry.HandsetsHandsets are looking more and more the size of mobile handsets back in the 90s, only now they have screens. Large-size screens will be in demand and LTPS TFT LCD technology will make a comeback after seeing its market share threatened from OLED panels, currently used primarily in Samsung Electronics handsets. Thinner, lighter and even flexible units will further make their way into the market, although bendable units will see minimal shipments due to complications in related supply chains. Moreover, consumers are unsure what to do with their bendable handsets other than to replicate a modern-day like Andy Warhol figure.TabletsTablet display technology is stagnating as vendors are seeing that the market is more limited compared to 2-3 years ago. There needs to be increased efforts to make protective eye features so that consumers can enjoy reading their tablets like books. If you look at a computer screen all day and then look to your Apple or Samsung tablet to read later at night you may find your eyes are exhausted and returning to books as a result. EPD makers can use this to their advantage and try to cooperate more with vendors to create book-like reading experiences without the eye strain.Commercial displaysPanel makers have done a good job expanding applications into the commercial, public and vehicle segments, and should continue doing so in order to drive panel demand. This is the most obvious case where panel makers seem to be creating their own demand rather than waiting for the demand to arrive.MakersOut of all the makers in the market, Taiwan-based ones face the biggest risk. The reason is that Taiwan makers neither take an aggressive stand for producing leading technology such as Korea and Japan makers, and yet do not have the funding or government assistance to expand production capacity or create new facilities. Taiwan is stuck in the middle in this regard and needs to make improvements so that it can secure orders from major vendors outside of the TV segment, otherwise it will be at a loss in the future.

Under the auspices of its Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE), Korea has adopted a new development model that integrates government, academic and industry resources to develop next-generation semiconductor products and materials, according to Digitimes Research.The business model, to be implemented during the period from 2013-2017, aims to solicit capital from government agencies and industry sectors and will channel the funds to academic organizations to develop new products and technologies.The academic organizations will be the holders of related IPs derived from these research projects.The focus of the R&D projects will include the development of non-volatile semiconductors such as phase-change random access memory (PRAM) chips, new copper/graphene laminated technologies that help ramp up computing capability of memory chips and tunnel field effect transistors (TFETs).Based on newly developed materials and technologies, Korea aims to develop core memory technologies that will enhance the value-added of memory chips, to develop chips for more wearable device applications and to upgrade the capacity and functionality of chips with low power consumption, said Digitimes Research.Meanwhile, to balance the development gap between large and small/medium enterprises, idle facilities at large enterprises as well as newly accomplished IP solutions may be transferred to and utilized by small and medium enterprises.

Asustek Computer's US$199 11.6-inch EeeBook X205 notebook (clamshell-type design), released during the IFA 2014 show, will only achieve shipments of 200,000 units in the fourth quarter and Digitimes Research believes if the inexpensive low-specification Wintel product is unable to find a new business model to boost sales, it can't compete with the Chromebook.Asustek's first Eee PC netbook, which was launched in the fourth quarter of 2007 and recorded 700,000 in unit shipments in the same quarter. Its 10.1-inch Transformer Book T100 detachable 2-in-1 device priced at US$260 on Amazon is expected to see 400,000 in unit shipments in the fourth quarter of 2014. Compared to them, the EeeBook X205's performance has been rather unsatisfactory.With the exception of display size, touchscreen feature and industrial design, the X205 and T100 have similar specifications with both featuring Intel's Atom Z3745 processor and 32GB eMMC.Despite similar performance and a price 30% cheaper, the X205 still has been outperformed by the T100 2-in-1 device in unit shipments, showing that the inexpensive low-specification traditional notebook is no longer able to attract consumers in a market that is filled with tablets and smartphones, Digitimes Research noted.However, featuring the same 11.6-inch non-touchscreen display and clamshell design and also pushing low price and thin-and-light characteristic like the X205, the bestselling Chromebook in 2014, Acer's C720, priced at US$215 and slightly higher than that of the X205, is able to ship over 400,000 units quarterly during the second half.Digitimes Research believes in addition to a higher grade processor (Celeron 2955U 1.4GHz), the C720's popularity also comes from the bundling with education software and service solutions and such an emerging business model has become a new direction for the traditional clamshell-type notebooks to create business opportunities.

China's over-the-top (OTT) set-top box (STB) market started taking off in 2012 and enjoyed a 10-fold on-year growth in 2013, but the market started seeing decline in the third quarter of 2014 because of the China government's restrictions on OTT STBs and the issue could cause the market to see only around 20% on-year growth in 2014.A series of restrictions from China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television over OTT STBs are forcing OTT STB vendors to cooperate with cable TV operators and TV stations, heating the competition between OTT and cable STB vendors.China's OTT STB shipments grew dramatically from around one million units in 2012 to 10 million units in 2013 thanks to China-based online video website's rich and free multimedia contents, and most OTT STB vendors have even integrated apps into their devices for watching contents transcribed from live broadcasting TV shows in China. These services significantly boosted consumers' demand for the device prior to the second half of 2014.Because China's OTT STB shipments in the second quarter were doubled from the first, most OTT STB vendors were originally optimistic about product sales in 2014.However, the China government's restrictions over online video content that OTT STB platform providers can offer and the allowed number of live broadcasting channels on OTT STBs as well as its demand for a pre-evaluation before TV programs can be broadcasted and all on-line video websites' apps to be offloaded from OTT STB devices, caused China's OTT STB shipments to drop sharply by 70% sequentially in the third quarter with annual shipments expected to reach only around 12 million units in 2014, up 20% from 2013.Nevertheless, OTT STB chip suppliers are still optimistic about the market in 2015 as they have seen demand for OTT STBs start recovering since Singles Day (November 11) shopping promotions and believe the government's management should help related players see a more clear direction.Digitimes Research believes the policies are more in favor of enterprises such as China's TV stations and cable TV operators. As a result, OTT STB vendors will be forced to cooperate with China's cable TV operators in the future and since these operators already have partnered cable STB vendors, the competition between OTT and cable STB vendors may start soon, making China one of the earliest countries to experience such a situation.

China Mobile had the number of its TD-LTE subscribers growing to 54.45 million as of the end of October 2014 and is expected to see the number reach 80 million at the end of the year, according to Digitimes Research.The number of China Mobile's TD-LTE subscribers has begun to increase fast in the second half of 2014 mainly because the telecom operator has offered relatively low pricing, been expanding TD-LTE network and launched many inexpensive TD-LTE-enabled terminal devices, Digitimes Research indicated. In 2015, China Mobile is expected to focus TD-LTE operation on marketing in rural areas and enhancing value-added services.Its local rivals, China Telecom and China Unicom, have set up trial LTE FDD/TD-LTE hybrid networks in more than 50 cities around China and may obtain LTE FDD operating licenses (each already obtained a TD-LTE license) in early 2015. However, with LTE FDD/TD-LTE hybrid licenses, China Telecom and China Unicom are still unable to break China Mobile's existing dominance in China 4G market.

In addition to Acer, which is set to launch a Broadwell-U-based 15.6-inch Chromebook in March 2015, Dell is planning to launch a 15.6-inch Chromebook with similar specifications in the first half of 2015 and both devices may be priced under US$300, according to Digitimes Research's latest findings from the upstream supply chain.Digitimes Research believes if the two vendors have adopted the Broadwell-U processor that has performance comparable to Intel's Core i3 CPU, the two Chromebooks will be very competitive in terms of price/performance ratio.With the exception of Lenovo's 11.6-inch touchscreen-ready N20P, which is above US$300, Chromebooks sized from 11.6- to 14-inch are all under US$300. The US$249-299 is the most commonly seen price range for these devices.For the new 15.6-inch Chromebook, Google has set the target price at less than US$300, and devices with the processor of Core i3 performance can be priced as high as US299, about US$50 cheaper than similar-specification models using a Wintel combination.Although Microsoft is planning to start a new Windows 8.1 with Bing project in February 2015 to push US$249 notebooks, the project has provided Google an opportunity to expand its presence in the notebook market with its inexpensive products as Microsoft's new project will not cover 15-inch products.