Many smartphone vendors have begun gearing up for the next wave of cost pressure. Samsung is increasingly switching production to Vietnam, where manufacturing costs currently undercut mainland China.
The global memory market presented a vivid picture of contrast last year given the wildly divergent fortunes of its two main segments, with spritely NAND offset by the sobering continued downturn of beleaguered NOR flash.
An increasing move on the part of enterprise businesses to move their information technology services, applications, and infrastructure to a cloud-based architecture will cause market revenue in this segment to surge by a factor of three from 2011 to 2017.
The worldwide market for industrial electronics semiconductors ended 2013 on a strong upbeat note, with overall revenue up convincingly from the previous year and reversing the disappointing decline of 2012.
Last year, consumers in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia snapped up nearly 3.8 million units of headphones and headsets ? a notable growth of 5 percent over the same period a year ago, expanding the overall market also by 5 percent in total worth.
While the market's growth rates remain impressive, they're down dramatically compared to the year-over-year rates of the same quarter one year ago (87.1 percent) and indicate a significant slowing of the overall market.
The Internet of Things (IoT), which excludes PCs, tablets, and smartphones, will grow to 26 billion units installed in 2020 representing an almost 30-fold increase from 0.9 billion in 2009.
