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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Viewing that China-based smartphone vendors have begun to adopt more GFF (a glass sheet and two layers of ITO film) touch panels in high-end products than OGS (one glass solution) solutions, China-based OGS touch panels makers including Biel Crystal Manufactory and Truly Optoelectronics have increased GFF touch panel production capacities, according to Digitimes Research.

While related policies and regulations chartered to the development of semiconductor industry in China, as defined in the nation's 13th Five-Year Plan for the period from 2016 to 2020, remain unclear, it is not doubt that China is likely to become one of the major predators for IC businesses during the period, according to Digitimes Research.