Toshiba officially announced today that its memory business will be spun off. Although the detail is not disclosed yet, but overall the procedure will be completed by March 31st . DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, believes that from this point on, Toshiba’s memory business will have more operational flexibility and stronger fundraising ability. These advantages in the long run will benefit the Toshiba-Western Digital alliance in the forms of expansion in NAND Flash production capacity and increased efficiency in storage product development.
The global smartphone production volume for 2016 grew 4.7% annually to reach 1.36 billion units in total, according to market research firm TrendForce. Samsung continued to top the annual global ranking despite the discontinuation of Galaxy Note 7, suffering a marginal decline of 3.3% compared with the 2015 figure. Chinese brands Huawei, OPPO and Vivo respectively occupied the last three spots in the global top five and followed closely behind the second-place Apple.
Global shipments of LCD TV panels for 2016 fell 3.5% from the prior year to around 260.4 million units, according to the latest report by WitsView, a division of TrendForce. Major panel makers expanded their Gen-8.5 production capacity during 2016 in response to the rising demand for larger TV panels. The increased production in the large-size segments helped consume the overall panel capacity and increased the average size of TV panels by 2.2 inches to 43.6 inches. Shipments of TV panels by area therefore actually increased by 6.5% annually. WitsView expects the average size of TV panels to increase again in 2017.
Development of AI systems and their applications will continue to revolve around voice and image recognition technologies in 2017. According to market research firm TrendForce, the global market value of voice recognition solutions is projected to grow from US$2.61 billion in 2016 to US$15.98 billion in 2021, with the CAGR in the forecast period at 43.64%. The main source of growth momentum will come from the widespread adoption of voice-based virtual assistants in various devices.