Areas affected by Japan's March 11 earthquake, aftershocks and the quake-triggered tsunamis include the prefectures of Fukushima, Miyagi, Aomori, Yamagata, Iwate and Akita.
LED players in Japan have been spared major impacts from the March 11 massive earthquake and tsunami that hit the country, as their plants are mostly far away from the stricken areas. With Japan not having a high market share in the LED industry, the global LED supply chain is not expected to be much affected, according to Digitimes Research.
While the massive tremor that ravaged the northeastern part of Japan did not cause damage to Japan's major production sites for DRAM and flash memory products, it may disrupt the supply of some key materials for the global semiconductor industry.
Japan-based Hitachi on March 7 announced that it has sold subsidiary Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), a top three hard disk drive (HDD) maker globally, to Western Digital (WD) for US$4.3 billion, which includes 25 million WD shares worth about US$750 million.
Sony in February announced 24.5-inch and 16.5-inch OLED display monitors priced at JPY2.42 million (about US$30,000) and JPY1.31 million, respectively. Their targets are professional users such as TV stations and movie production houses.
Sony Ericsson saw revenues in the fourth quarter of 2010 fall 4.7% sequentially to EUR1.53 billion (US$2.12 billion). Revenues for 2010 came to EUR6.29 billion versus EUR6.79 billion in 2009. Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are the company's largest revenue source, but the three markets also combined for the largest sales drop off.
As global penetration of LED TV's increases and LEDs get ready to take the lighting sector by storm, global demand for metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) has been increasingly markedly since 2010, according to a recently published DIGITIMES Research Special Report titled "Survey of upstream LED component industry."
Tablet PCs were the main attractions at this year's CES and MWC. Though smartphone and computer vendors introduced their latest tablet PC at the exhibitions, Apple, the company that brought tablet PCs to the forefront, did not unveil the next generation iPad until March 2.
Founded in April 2009, Samsung LED has become Samsung Electronics' main LED supplier in LED TV backlight applications. Samsung LED is aggressively expanding its MOCVD capacity and up until the second quarter of 2010, it had maintained revenue growth.
During a February 14 Mobile World Congress (MWC) press event, ST-Ericsson CEO Gilles Delfassy indicated that Internet devices will increase to 50 billion units. This means that in addition to existing Internet devices, there will be more devices capable of Internet connectivity, realizing machine-to-machine (M2M)...
