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The future is here: Yes, it is Microsoft Surface 2 with modern apps only! (And ARM, not x86/x64!)

November 17, 2013 3:59 pm / Leave a comment

This video is speaking for itself (and for the title): Why I Love my Microsoft Surface 2 : Tips and Tricks [Sean Ong YouTube channel, Nov 3, 2013]

In this video I show off my favorite features in the Microsoft Surface 2, with windows 8.1 RT. I show off voice control (windows speech recognition), multiple monitor support, and a variety of accessories via USB hub (including external hard drive, mouse, keyboard, and Xbox 360 controller integration). I show how I connect the Surface 2 to my HDTV as well as wireless casting of music and video! I also go through some other features, such as Spotify web player, and icloud web. Also kid friendly applications and multiple accounts. There’s so much stuff this thing can do, it will blow your mind away

That is how Sean Ong, a senior consultant at Navigant (focussing there on “technical, economic, and policy analysis of energy efficiency and renewable energy systems”) and himself an energy analysis engineer, was able to present the above, truly incredible customer value from current and especially future point of view for Windows 8.1 in geneneral and Surface 2 (ARM based) in particular. It is even more remarkable as nobody, I REPEAT NOBODY, from Microsoft worldwide could do that. I know even a highly professional, true world class Windows 8/Windows 8.1 expert who was not only fascinated himself by the above video, but acknowledged honestly that he was unaware of the speech recognition progress in Windows 8.1. And we are talking about an internal expert who has already been involved in the internal expert network of similar, most devoted Microsoft specialists in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 for years.

For me this video is incredibly important because:

NOT ONLY FOR THE FUTURE OF MICROSOFT BUT FOR THE WHOLE STATE OF COMPUTING
AS THE MISSING COMMUNICATIONS FROM MICROSOFT, EVEN THE TOTAL INABILITY OF MICROSOFT TO COMMUNICATE THE INHERENT WINDOWS 8.1/SURFACE 2 VALUES, WERE CLEARLY POINTING TO TOTAL LACK OF MARKETING COMPETENCY FOR ITS GAME-CHANGING, MICROSOFT-ONLY, POST PC AREA INNOVATIONS INHERENT IN WINDOWS 8.1/SURFACE 2

Although these signs (both the positive and negative ones) were coupled with a number of competitive positive changes for Microsoft, such as:

But a number of competitive negative changes for Microsoft became even more worrisome (than any time before) lately, such as:

Fortunately we already know:

Board of directors initiates succession process; Ballmer remains CEO until successor is named.
Microsoft Corp. today announced that Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer has decided to retire as CEO within the next 12 months, upon the completion of a process to choose his successor. In the meantime, Ballmer will continue as CEO and will lead Microsoft through the next steps of its transformation to a devices and services company that empowers people for the activities they value most.
“There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time,” Ballmer said. “We have embarked on a new strategy with a new organization and we have an amazing Senior Leadership Team. My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction.”
The Board of Directors has appointed a special committee to direct the process. This committee is chaired by John Thompson, the board’s lead independent director, and includes Chairman of the Board Bill Gates, Chairman of the Audit Committee Chuck Noski and Chairman of the Compensation Committee Steve Luczo. The special committee is working with Heidrick & Struggles International Inc., a leading executive recruiting firm, and will consider both external and internal candidates.
“The board is committed to the effective transformation of Microsoft to a successful devices and services company,” Thompson said. “As this work continues, we are focused on selecting a new CEO to work with the company’s senior leadership team to chart the company’s course and execute on it in a highly competitive industry.”
“As a member of the succession planning committee, I’ll work closely with the other members of the board to identify a great new CEO,” said Gates. “We’re fortunate to have Steve in his role until the new CEO assumes these duties.”
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
Outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has always been a speaker and performer like no other — his absolute enthusiasm for his company is electric in person, turning ordinary corporate events into raw displays of emotion that are often criticized but never forgotten. Read more at The Verge: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/27/4779036/exclusive-video-steve-ballmers-intense-tearful-goodbye-to-microsoft
Steve Ballmer paced his corner office on a foggy January morning here, listening through loudspeakers to his directors’ voices on a call that would set in motion the end of his 13-year reign as Microsoft Corp.’s MSFT -0.47% chief executive.
Microsoft lagged behind Apple Inc. AAPL -0.60% and Google Inc. GOOG -0.16% in important consumer markets, despite its formidable software revenue. Mr. Ballmer tried to spell out his plan to remake Microsoft, but a director cut him off, telling him he was moving too slowly.
“Hey, dude, let’s get on with it,” lead director John Thompson says he told him. “We’re in suspended animation.” Mr. Ballmer says he replied that he could move faster.
But the contentious call put him on a difficult journey toward his August decision to retire, sending Microsoft into further tumult as it began seeking a successor to a man who has been at its heart for 33 years.
“Maybe I’m an emblem of an old era, and I have to move on,” the 57-year-old Mr. Ballmer says, pausing as his eyes well up. “As much as I love everything about what I’m doing,” he says, “the best way for Microsoft to enter a new era is a new leader who will accelerate change.”
Mr. Ballmer, in a series of exclusive interviews tinged with his characteristic bluster and wistfulness, tells of how he came to believe that he couldn’t lead Microsoft forward—that, in fact, Microsoft would not be led by him because of the very corporate culture he had helped instill.
Mr. Ballmer and his board have been in agreement: Microsoft, while maintaining its strong software business, must shake up its management structure and refocus on mobile devices and online services if it is to find future profit growth and reduce its dependence on the fading PC market.
The board’s beef was speed. The directors “didn’t push Steve to step down,” says Mr. Thompson, a longtime technology executive who heads the board’s CEO-search committee, “but we were pushing him damn hard to go faster.”
Investors, too, were pushing for transformation. “At this critical juncture, Wall Street wants new blood to bring fundamental change,” says Brent Thill, a longtime Microsoft analyst at UBS AG. “Steve was a phenomenal leader who racked up profits and market share in the commercial business, but the new CEO must innovate in areas Steve missed—phone, tablet, Internet services, even wearables.”
The Microsoft board’s list of possible successors includes, among others, former Nokia Corp. NOK1V.HE +0.25% CEO Stephen Elop, Microsoft enterprise-software chief Satya Nadella and Ford Motor Co. F -0.12% CEO Alan Mulally, say people familiar with the search. In conjunction with Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting Nov. 19, the board plans to meet and will discuss succession, says a person familiar with the schedule.
Representatives for Mr. Elop and Mr. Nadella say the men have no comment on the search. A Ford spokesman says “nothing has changed” since November 2012, when Ford said Mr. Mulally would remain CEO through at least 2014, adding: “Alan remains absolutely focused on continuing to make progress on our One Ford plan. We do not engage in speculation.”
Microsoft’s next chief will be only the third in its history. Mr. Ballmer joined in 1980 at the suggestion of his Harvard University pal, co-founder Bill Gates, and is its second-largest individual shareholder and a billionaire.
After growing up in Detroit, where his father was a Ford manager, Mr. Ballmer roomed down the hall from Mr. Gates at Harvard. He dropped his Stanford M.B.A. studies to become Microsoft’s first business manager.
He was Mr. Gates’s right-hand man, helping turn Microsoft into a force that redefined how the world used computers. He took the reins in 2000, further solidifying Microsoft’s position in software markets and keeping the profit engine humming. Revenue tripled during his tenure to almost $78 billion in the year ended this June, and profit grew 132% to nearly $22 billion.
But while profit rolled in from Microsoft’s traditional markets, it missed epic changes, including Web-search advertising and the consumer shift to mobile devices and social media.
Last year, Mr. Ballmer sought to reboot. In an October shareholder letter, he declared Microsoft would become a provider of “devices and services” for businesses and individuals.
He told the board he wanted to lead the charge and remain until his youngest son graduated from high school in four years. He began his own succession planning by meeting potential candidates in what he calls “cloak-and-dagger” meetings.
Mr. Ballmer’s reboot plan required a corporate overhaul. For guidance, he called his longtime friend, Ford’s Mr. Mulally, once a top Boeing Co. BA +0.73% executive. They met Christmas Eve at a Starbucks on Mercer Island near Seattle.
Mr. Ballmer brought a messenger bag, pulling out onto a table an array of phones and tablets from Microsoft and competitors. He asked Mr. Mulally how he turned around Ford. For four hours, he says, Mr. Mulally detailed how teamwork and simplifying the Ford brand helped him reposition it.
The Ford spokesman says: “Ford and Microsoft have a long-standing business partnership, and many of our leaders discuss business together frequently.”
It was a wake-up call for Mr. Ballmer, who had run the software giant with bravado and concedes that “I’m big, I’m bald and I’m loud.”
Microsoft’s culture included corporate silos where colleagues were often pitted against one another—a competitive milieu that spurred innovation during Microsoft’s heyday but now sometimes leaves groups focused on their own legacies and bottom lines rather than on the big technology picture and Microsoft as a whole.
He recalls thinking: “I’ll remake my whole playbook. I’ll remake my whole brand.”
The board liked his new plan. But as Mr. Ballmer prepared to implement it, his directors on the January conference call demanded he expedite it.
Pushing hardest, say participants, were Mr. Thompson, who had held top jobs at International Business Machines Corp. IBM +0.54% and Symantec Corp. SYMC +0.38%, and Stephen Luczo, CEO of Seagate Technology STX -2.33% PLC. Mr. Luczo declines to comment.
“But, I didn’t want to shift gears until I shipped Windows,” Mr. Ballmer says he told the directors on the call, explaining that he hadn’t moved faster in late 2012 because he was focused on releasing in October the next generation of Windows, Microsoft’s longtime cash cow.
Mr. Ballmer swung into gear, drafting a management-reorganization plan to discuss during a March retreat at a Washington mountain resort. He invited Mr. Thompson and another director, to get board perspective on his plan.
Instead, he got more pressure. Mr. Thompson says he told Mr. Ballmer and his executives: “Either get on the bus or get off.”
Mr. Ballmer says he took that as an endorsement of his plan. That evening, some of them played poker, drank Scotch and gathered around the lodge’s fireplace.
The next month, hedge fund ValueAct Capital disclosed a $2 billion Microsoft stake. ValueAct’s CEO Jeffrey Ubben at a conference said Microsoft’s stock was undervalued. Other shareholders were urging it to increase its dividend and shed noncore businesses. A ValueAct spokesman declines further comment. In September, Microsoft increased its dividend but hasn’t sold off businesses investors have urged it to, such as the Bing search engine.
Mr. Ballmer hewed to Mr. Mulally’s recommendations. For years, he had consulted with Microsoft’s unit chiefs individually, often dispensing marching orders. Now, he began inviting them to sit together in a circle in his office to foster camaraderie.
It was a lurching corporate-culture change. “It’s not the way we operated at all in Steve’s 30-plus years of leadership of the company,” says Mr. Nadella, an executive vice president.
Mr. Ballmer says his senior team struggled with the New Steve. Some resisted on matters large—combining engineering teams—and small, such as weekly status reports.
Qi Lu, an executive vice president, submitted a 56-page report on applications and services. Mr. Ballmer sent it back, insisting on just three pages—part of a new mandate to encourage the simplicity needed for collaboration. Mr. Lu says he retorted: “But you always want the data and detail!”
Mr. Ballmer says he started to realize he had trained managers to see the trees, not the forest, and that many weren’t going to take his new mandates to heart.
In May, he began wondering whether he could meet the pace the board demanded. “No matter how fast I want to change, there will be some hesitation from all constituents—employees, directors, investors, partners, vendors, customers, you name it—to believe I’m serious about it, maybe even myself,” he says.
His personal turning point came on a London street. Winding down from a run one morning during a May trip, he had a few minutes to stroll, some rare spare time for recent months. For the first time, he began thinking Microsoft might change faster without him.
“At the end of the day, we need to break a pattern,” he says. “Face it: I’m a pattern.”
Mr. Ballmer says he secretly began drafting retirement letters—ultimately some 40 of them, ranging from maudlin to radical.
On a plane from Europe in late May, he told Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith that it “might be the time for me to go.” The next day, Mr. Ballmer called Mr. Thompson, with the same message.
Mr. Thompson called two other directors, Mr. Luczo and Charles Noski, former Bank of America Corp. BAC +0.84% vice chairman, and says he told them: “If Steve’s ready to go, let’s see if we can get on with this.”
At the board’s June meeting in Bellevue, Wash., Mr. Ballmer says he told the directors: “While I would like to stay here a few more years, it doesn’t make sense for me to start the transformation and for someone else to come in during the middle.”
The board wasn’t “surprised or shocked,” says Mr. Noski, given directors’ conversations with Mr. Ballmer. Mr. Thompson says he and others indicated that “fresh eyes and ears might accelerate what we’re trying to do here.”
Mr. Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, told Mr. Ballmer that he understood from experience how hard it was to leave when Microsoft was your “life,” says someone familiar with Mr. Gates’s thinking. Mr. Gates told the board he supported Mr. Ballmer’s departure if it ensured Microsoft “remains successful,” this person says.
That night, after Mr. Ballmer watched his son sing at his high-school baccalaureate ceremony—a Coldplay song with the lyrics: “It’s such a shame for us to part; nobody said it was easy; no one ever said it would be this hard”—he says he told his wife and three sons he was probably leaving Microsoft. They all cried.
On Aug. 21, the board held a conference call to accept Mr. Ballmer’s retirement. Mr. Gates and Mr. Thompson sat with Mr. Ballmer in his office. It was over in less than an hour.
Mr. Ballmer vows not to be a lame duck.
“Charge! Charge! Charge!” he bellows, jumping up from an interview and lunging forward while pumping his fist forward like a battering ram. “I’m not going to wimp away from anything!”
He has remained active, shepherding a $7.5 billion deal to buy Nokia’s mobile businesses and fine-tuning holiday-marketing strategies for Microsoft’s Surface tablets and new Xbox game console. In October, Microsoft reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings.
At his final annual employee meeting this September, Mr. Ballmer gave high-fives and ran off the stage to the song: “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from the movie “Dirty Dancing.”
Last month, walking along Lake Washington, Mr. Ballmer bumped into Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, who was fired from earlier jobs and now is thriving. Mr. Carroll says he told his neighbor he went through “something like this” and predicted it is “going to be great.”
Mr. Ballmer says he is weighing casual offers as varied as university teaching and coaching his youngest son’s high-school basketball team. He plans no big decisions for at least six months—except that he won’t run another big company. He says he’s open to remaining a Microsoft director.
At a recent executive meeting, he perched on a stool to review developments. His third slide was labeled “New CEO.”
“Not a soul in this room doesn’t think we need to go through this transition,” he said. As he stood up, his voice started to crack: “As much as I wish I could stay your CEO, I still own a big chunk of Microsoft, and I’m going to keep it.”
He walked back toward the stool, then turned around and said in a near-whisper: “Please take good care of Microsoft.”

You could read also Reporter’s Notebook: Two Days With Steve Ballmer [The Wall Street Journal, Nov 15, 2013] ending this way: 

… This summer when he was deciding whether to step down, Mr. Ballmer quietly met with big institutional investors in Boston and San Francisco. The head of one big institution told him, “Microsoft would be better served with you gone.” Mr. Ballmer, who’s the second largest individual shareholder, knew the investor might get his wish. Yet, he argued, “Who cares more about Microsoft than I do? I own a lot. It’s my life.”

And that showed how his emotions alternate between bluster and wistfulness. The deed is done, the decision has been made, a new CEO is imminent. But Mr. Ballmer is struggling because Microsoft has been so much more than a job … as he said, “my life.”

My closing remarks:

  1. The next CEO problem to be solved is definitely the #1 issue for the future of the Microsoft
  2. The #2 issue is how successfully the Unique Nokia assets (from factories to global device distribution & sales, and the Asha sub $100 smartphone platform etc.) will now empower the One Microsoft devices and services strategy [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Sept 3, 2013] for which the Microsoft answers to the questions about Nokia devices and services acquisition: tablets, Windows downscaling, reorg effects, Windows Phone OEMs, cost rationalization, ‘One Microsoft’ empowerment, and supporting developers for an aggressive growth in market share [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Sept 4, 2013] is providing an interim answer, i.e. till the arrival of the new CEO
  3. The #3 isssue is How the device play will unfold in the new Microsoft organization? [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 14, 2013]. If Stephen Elop, former CEO of Nokia, and a previous senior executive of Microsoft, will become the next CEO then Minutes of a high-octane but also expert evangelist CEO: Stephen Elop, Nokia [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 13, 2013] could provide some clue for changes to be expected as a strategic evolution of the current one described in the already mentioned [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 14, 2013]. Even in case when he will not be selected by the Microsoft board as the next CEO he will have very strong influence on the device play for the initial first year integration of the acquired Nokia businesses into Microsoft, for very simple reason, that nobody could do this, and a successfull integration is a higher priority, #2 issue.
  4. Strategically, however, the most important issue is the

    5. Microsoft reorg for delivering/supporting high-value experiences/activities [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 11, 2013]

  5. Everything else which might be a crucial issue during this process is highly controversial, without any official clues from Microsoft or any other stakeholder sources. The most controversial among all of them is the issue of non-profitable and/or not necessarily integral to Microsoft businesses. These are the Bing and the Xbox businesses. The range of external opinions is extremely large with investment circles firmly believing that neither Bing nor Xbox are inherently integral to Microsoft, and most of the external development community with an exacly opposite belief of those businesses being inherently internal.

  6. My personal opinion is that with spin-off both extremes could be served sufficiently well, and even open completely new business development opportunities for both Bing and Xbox to grow substantially faster and bigger than otherwise. I would be especially enthusiastic for an Xbox spin-off as that business is already (with upcoming Oct 22 introduction of Xbox One) not a gaming console, but an entertainment ecosystem type of business. As such it would get enormous growth opportunities with its spin-off from the tightly integrated Microsoft mother ship.

  7. The ultimate issue for me, however, is how the currently quite crippled and/or bureaucratic marketing machinery of Microsoft could be completely overhauled as part of Nokia integration, and how fast that could be achieved, if any? I mean a new marketing machinery which is thriving on the huge number of opportunities provided by already delivered game-changing products and technologies, instead of not understanding them at all. I mean not simply an ability to produce videos like the one in the beginning of this post, but a competency to produce whole storyboards for production of such videos and other communication materials. One might call it “high-octane marketing” for simplicity. Even more I envisage such integration of the marketing activities into the whole supply chain management (SCM) as is done in Samsung. See my Samsung has unbeatable supply chain management, it is incredibly good in everything which is consumer hardware, but vulnerability remains in software and M&A [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 11, 2013] post for that, from which I will copy the following illustration here as well:

Q3’13 smartphone and overall mobile phone markets: Android smartphones surpassed 80% of the market, with Samsung increasing its share to 32.1% against Apple’s 12.1% only; while Nokia achieved a strong niche market position both in “proper” (Lumia) and “de facto” (Asha Touch) smartphones

November 14, 2013 9:19 pm / Leave a comment

Details about Samsung’s strengths you can find inside the Samsung has unbeatable supply chain management, it is incredibly good in everything which is consumer hardware, but vulnerability remains in software and M&A [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 11, 2013] post of mine.

My findings supporting the above title:

  • 205 million Android smartphones were delivered in Q3’13, representing 15.2% growth sequentially (Q/Q) and 67.3% growth relative to the same period of last year (Y/Y)
  • Meanwhile the number of Apple iPhones shipped increased only to 33.8 million, growing by 8.3% sequentially (Q/Q), but still representing a 25.65% growth relative to the same period of last year (Y/Y)
  • The shipment of “proper” smartphones from Nokia (S60/Symbian and Lumia/Windows Phone) increased to 8.8 million units, representing 18.9% growth sequentially (Q/Q) and 39.7% growth relative to the same period of last year (Y/Y)

image

Than for the lead smartphone market, i.e. Mainland China I will include here:

There were 102.66 million handsets sold in the China market during the third quarter of 2013, growing 13.6% on quarter and 54.5% on year, of which 93.08 million units were smartphones, increasing 20.7% on quarter and 89.3% on year, according to China-based consulting company Analysys International.

image

While for the worldwide market:

Lenovo, ZTE, Huawei and Yulong/Coolpad have taken advantage of the surging low-end smartphone market. According to IC Insights, the four major China-based handset companies are forecast to ship 168 million smartphones in 2013 and together hold a 17% share of the worldwide smartphone market.
Lenovo, ZTE, Huawei and Yulong/Coolpad shipped a combined 98 million smartphones in 2012, a more than 300% surge from the 29 million units shipped in 2011, IC Insights disclosed. It should be noted that the China-based suppliers of smartphones are primarily serving the China and Asia-Pacific marketplace, and offer low-end models that typically sell for less than US$200.
Low-end smartphones are expected to represent just under one-third (310 million) of the total 975 million smartphones shipped in 2013. IC Insights forecast that by 2017, low-end smartphone shipments will represent 46% of the total smartphone market with China and the Asia-Pacific region to remain the primary markets for these low-end models.
Samsung Electronics and Apple are set to continue dominating the total smartphone market in 2013. The two vendors are forecast to ship 457 million units and together hold a 47% share of the total smartphone market in 2013, IC Insights said. In 2012, Samsung and Apple shipped 354 million smartphones and took a combined 50% share of the total smartphone market.
Nokia was third-largest supplier of smartphones behind Samsung and Apple in 2011, but has seen its share of the smartphone market fall. Nokia’s smartphone shipments are forecast to decline by another 4% and grab an only 3% share of the total smartphone market in 2013, IC Insights indicated.
Other smartphone producers that have fallen on hard times include RIM and HTC. While each of these companies had about a 10% share of the smartphone market in 2011, IC Insights estimated they will have only about 2% shares of the 2013 smartphone market.

image

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled 455.6 million units in the third quarter of 2013, an increase of 5.7 percent from the same period last year, according to Gartner, Inc. Sales of smartphones accounted for 55 percent of overall mobile phone sales in the third quarter of 2013, and reached their highest share to date.

Worldwide smartphone sales to end users reached 250.2 million units, up 45.8 percent from the third quarter of 2012. Asia/Pacific led the growth in both markets – the smartphone segment with 77.3 percent increase and the mobile phone segment with 11.9 percent growth. The other regions to show an increase in the overall mobile phone market were Western Europe, which returned to growth for the first time this year, and the Americas.

“Sales of feature phones continued to decline and the decrease was more pronounced in markets where the average selling price (ASP) for feature phones was much closer to the ASP affordable smartphones,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “In markets such as China and Latin America, demand for feature phones fell significantly as users rushed to replace their old models with smartphones.”

Gartner analysts said global mobile phone sales are on pace to reach 1.81 billion units in 2013, a 3.4 percent increase from 2012. “We will see several new tablets enter the market for the holiday season, and we expect consumers in mature markets will favor the purchase of smaller-sized tablets over the replacement of their older smartphones” said Mr. Gupta.

While Samsung’s share was flat in the third quarter of 2013, Samsung increased its lead over Apple in the global smartphone market (see Table 1). The launch of the Samsung Note 3 helped reaffirm Samsung as the clear leader in the large display smartphone market, which it pioneered.
Lenovo’s sales of smartphones grew to 12.9 million units, up 84.5 percent year-on-year. It constantly raised share in the Chinese smartphone market.
Apple’s smartphone sales reached 30.3 million units in the third quarter of 2013, up 23.2 percent from a year ago. “While the arrival of the new iPhones 5s and 5c had a positive impact on overall sales, such impact could have been greater had they not started shipping late in the quarter. While we saw some inventory built up for the iPhone 5c, there was good demand for iPhone 5s with stock out in many markets,” said Mr. Gupta.

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In the smartphone operating system (OS) market (see Table 2), Android surpassed 80 percent market share in the third quarter of 2013, which helped extend its leading position. “However, the winner of this quarter is Microsoft which grew 123 percent. Microsoft announced the intent to acquire Nokia’s devices and services business, which we believe will unify effort and help drive appeal of Windows ecosystem,” said Mr. Gupta. Forty-one per cent of all Android sales were in mainland China, compared to 34 percent a year ago. Samsung is the only non-Chinese vendor in the top 10 Android players ranking in China. Whitebox Yulong [Coolpad] is the third largest Android vendor in China with a 9.7 percent market share in the third quarter of 2013. Xiaomi represented 4.3 percent of Android sales in the third quarter of 2013, up from 1.4 percent a year ago.

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Mobile Phone Vendor Perspective

Samsung: Samsung extended its lead in the overall mobile phone market, as its market share totaled 25.7 percent in the third quarter of 2013 (see Table 3). “While Samsung has started to address its user experience, better design is another area where Samsung needs to focus,” said Mr. Gupta. “Samsung’s recent joint venture with carbon fiber company SGL Group could bring improvements in this area in future products.”
Nokia: Nokia did better than anticipated in the third quarter of 2013, reaching 63 million mobile phones, thanks to sales of both Lumia and Asha series devices. Increased smartphone sales supported by an expanded Lumia portfolio, helped Nokia move up to the No. 8 spot in the global smartphone market. But regional and Chinese Android device manufacturers continued to beat market demand, taking larger share and creating a tough competitive environment for Lumia devices.
Apple:  Gartner believes the price difference between the iPhone 5c and 5s is not enough in mature markets, where prices are skewed by operator subsidies, to drive users away from the top of the line model. In emerging markets, the iPhone 4S will continue to be the volume driver at the low end as the lack of subsidy in most markets leaves the iPhone 5c too highly priced to help drive further penetration.
Lenovo: Lenovo moved to the No. 7 spot in the global mobile phone market, with sales reaching approximately 13 million units in the third quarter of 2013. “Lenovo continues to rely heavily on its home market, which represents more than 95 per cent of its overall mobile phone sales. This could limit its growth after 2014, when the Chinese market is expected to decelerate,” said Mr. Gupta.

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The tablet market in Q1-Q3’13: It was mainly shaped by white-box vendors while Samsung was quite successfully attacking both Apple and the white-box vendors with triple digit growth both worldwide and in Mainland China

November 14, 2013 4:11 pm / Leave a comment

Details about Samsung’s strengths you can find inside the Samsung has unbeatable supply chain management, it is incredibly good in everything which is consumer hardware, but vulnerability remains in software and M&A [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Nov 11, 2013] post of mine.

Note what was communicated in the 2013 global tablet forecast [Dec 11, 2012]:

  • imageDIGITIMES Research forecasts that global tablet shipments (including both branded and white box models) will overtake notebook shipments in 2013, growing by 38.3% on 2012 levels to hit 210 million units.
  • Shipments of branded tablets alone are forecast to reach 140 million units. That is the shipment of white box tablets is forecast to grow to more than 70 million units in 2013. [NS: Q1-Q3’: 62.6 million]
  • DIGITIMES Research also projects that global shipments of branded and white box tablets will top 300 million by 2015, with branded devices accounting for more than 200 million units and white box tablets for around 100 million.

My findings behind the title statement:

  • White-box vendors from Mainland China delivered 62.6 million tablets in Q1-Q3’13 vs. 35.4 million a year ago (76.8% growth) per DIGITIMES Research
    (the two latest sources used for that are included in the end)
  • Apple delivered 48.2 million tablets in Q1-Q3’13 vs. 42.8 million a year ago (12.6% growth) per IDC
    (the IDC sources used are the corresponding quarterly press releases)
  • Samsung delivered 27.3 million tablets in Q1-Q3’13 vs. 8.7 million a year ago (214% growth) per IDC (with a H1’13 correction from Samsung itself)
  • IDC’s latest forecast couldn’t take properly into the account the group of white-box vendors (44.6 million in “Others” category vs. 62.6 million), even more than a year ago (25.8 million in “Others” category vs. 35.4 million)
  • With such error for Q1-Q3’13 there was a 142.6 million strong worldwide market by IDC vs. 76.4 million a year ago (86.7% growth)
  • Together the white-box vendors, Apple and Samsung, as the market changing vendors/vendor group delivered 132.7 million tablets in Q1-Q3’13 vs. 86.9 million a year ago (52.7% growth)
  • Meanwhile the “Others” group (with improper inclusion of white-box vendors) by IDC delivered 49.8 million tablets in Q1-Q3’13 vs. 25.8 million a year ago (93% growth)

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  • Mainland China had a 4.4 million strong tablet market in Q3’13 vs. the 44.6 million worldwide market as per IDC. Since white-box vendors sold 25 million tablets worldwide (according to DIGITIMES Reasearch) in Q3’13 vs. only 16.8 million sales in the ‘Others’ category by IDC we can safely raise the 49.8 million number by upto 10 million to upto 60 million. This means that in the current quarter Mainland China constituted at least 8.8% of the worldwide tablet market.
  • The sequential (Q/Q) growth rate on the Mainland China market per Analysis Int. is:
    image
  • Meanwhile the sequential (Q/Q) growth rate on the worldwide market per IDC is:
    image
  • This means that Mainland China has much less seasonality than the worldwide market, which is a sign of greater untapped tablet demand than in other markets of the world. Considering the fact that an unusually large group of local tablet vendors are playing the local brand game in China, while the white-box vendor game outside, any global brand tablet vendor should already participate in the Mainland China market in order to succeed worldwide. Lenovo, Samsung and Microsoft have clearly recognised this:


image(the two latest Analysis International sources used for that are indicated later)

image

  • Samsung has dramatically increased its market penetration efforts in Q3’13 and succeeded quite well. In fact it was able to push back somewhat the growth rate of the group of local brand vendors (from 170% Q/Q growth rate in Q2’13 to 150% in Q3’13) while significantly increased its own growth rate (from 170% to a whopping 220%).

image

  • Therefore, if things stay as it is (see the above chart) Samsung will outgrow local brand vendors on the Mainland China market within a year.
  • Otherwise, if the group of local brand vendors will be able to withstand Samsung’s local efforts and significantly improve the value of their own brands, then the outlook may return to a view which could have been forecasted after Q2’13 (see the below chart):

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  • Meanwhile two local brands, Teclast (台电) and Onda (昂达) each were able to beat two other global brands, Asus and Acer, on the Mainland China market in the last two quarters.
  • The group of ‘Others’, i.e. other local brands taken together were able to grow by similar rate in the last two quarters which shows that with an ongoing consolidation of the local brands (details ommitted here) a few local brands may join Teclast and Onda as the strongest local vendors which will have an opportunity to change their white-box vendor status abroad (and grow globally under their own brand as well).

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The Q3’13 and Q2’13 Analysys International sources:
– Nov 8, 2013: http://www.enfodesk.com/SMinisite/maininfo/articledetail-id-389539.html
– Aug 28, 2013: http://www.enfodesk.com/SMinisite/maininfo/articledetail-id-376953.html

The Q3’13 and Q2’13 DIGITIMES Research sources:

China white-box tablet shipments reached about 25 million units in the third quarter of 2013, up 56.3% sequentially and 40.4% on year thanks to strong overseas shipments, which accounted for 80% of the total volume. Among white-box tablet shipments, 7-inch models accounted for the largest share, while 8-inch models, which were originally expected to become new star products, were unable to do so because of high costs from the bezel design and limited supply of 8-inch panels.
Although white-box tablets are expected to see extraordinary growth in 2013, they are also expected to face more obstacles and challenges in the future. First, they will see strong price competition from large brand vendors, which will offer Android-based products at price levels similar to those of white-box models. Second, the tablet market will gradually reach saturation and should no longer see demand as strong as before.
Third, white-box tablet costs have already hit the bottom margin, causing related assembly service providers and component suppliers to see limited profits. Several unhealthy players were already been eliminated from the market at the end of the second quarter, while the remaining players will need to rely on pumping up their shipments to support their profitability. However, such a strategy is unlikely to sustain for long, Digitimes Research noted.
Digitimes Research also found that white-box tablets in Europe or North America are mostly used as gifts in product promotions or bundling deals and therefore specifications are not as high as those of regular tablets. As for emerging markets such as Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America, most consumers are buying white-box tablets with a single-core processor, because of limited purchasing power.
As for application processors (APs), 70% of white-box tablets with phone functions adopted solutions from MediaTek in the third quarter, replacing the solutions from China-based Allwinner, the original favorite. Digitimes Research estimates that the proportion of white-box Wi-Fi-only tablets using MediaTek’s solution will also increase dramatically starting the fourth quarter, further impacting China-based Allwinner and Rockchip’s AP shipments. In addition to low prices, China-based AP suppliers will also need to consider how to create additional value for their APs to survive the competition.
White-box tablet shipments reached only 15.9 million units in the second quarter of 2013, down 26.3% sequentially due to weakening tablet demand in May and June. Many smaller white-box players were also forced to quit the market, according to Digitimes Research’s latest figures.
Although white-box tablet shipments peaked in April 2013, increasing component costs and the fact that consumers are becoming more sensitive over tablet pricing, are impacting white-box players’ profitability.
For component supply, China-based chipmakers’ competition is gradually becoming fierce for both single-core and dual-core processors. In August 2013, some single-core processor prices were as low as US$5. By the end of 2013, dual-core processor will become the basic specification for entry-level white-box tablets, while mid-range models will turn to quad-core processor completely, Digitimes Research noted.
DRAM and NAND Flash remained at high price points in the second quarter of 2013, but as related players are increasing their supplies in the third quarter, prices are dropping.
As for panels, an entry-level 7-inch TN panel was priced at about US$10-11 at the beginning of the third quarter, and the price has been rising. Although the industry is seeing tight panel supply, the issue is expected to be eased as more panel players will open up new production lines to manufacture small-to-medium size panels in the first half of 2014.
White-box vendors’ over-optimism about demand in the first half created high tablet inventories for the vendors. Weak demand in Europe and North America has affected sales of both first-tier brand vendors and white-box players.
As for China, local first-tier brand vendors’ increasing sales have impacted white-box models’ demand in the country. Emerging markets such as India, Russia, countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia, are only providing limited contributions to white-box tablet players because shipments to these countries have just recently started.
Currently, strengthening their inventory management and expanding into overseas emerging markets will be important tasks for white-box tablet players to survive in the tablet market.

Leading PC vendors of the past: Go enterprise or die!

November 7, 2013 11:17 am / 1 Comment on Leading PC vendors of the past: Go enterprise or die!

Nov 5, 2013: Acer Chairman and CEO J.T. Wang Tenders Resignation

… J.T. Wang, chairman and CEO of Acer, said, “Acer encountered many complicated and harsh challenges in the past few years. With the consecutive poor financial results, it is time for me to hand over the responsibility to a new leadership team to path the way for a new era.” …

What I found after carefully analyzing the above outcome is summarized in the titles of the detailed sections of this post:

  1. To be great only for consumers was not enough to survive
  2. Taiwan is still confused
  3. How Acer’s “new strategy” that has been in place since April 1, 2011 came to an end
  4. The road which lead to Acer downfall

1. To be great only for consumers was not enough to survive

THE LATEST EPISODES showing what was great from a general consumer point of view but not enough by far from enterprise point of view:

We would all like to be a touch smarter, a touch cooler, a touch classier, and a touch simpler… With Acer it is possible, explore beyond limits with our touch & type products.
IFA BERLIN 2013. For the those who missed the latest designed ‘Touch’ innovations from Acer. The Iconia A3: 10.1″ display with wide viewing angle and immersive sound. The Aspire R7: Award wining designed for touch notebook with active pen. The Liquid S2: Full HD 6″ display with 4K recording.
Highlights from Acer’s Computex Global Press Conference, product booth, and Tiësto party
See what happended during Acer’s Global Press Conference in New York City on May 3rd, 2013. Redefining the computing experience.

AcerCloud™ – Be Free! [Acer YouTube channel, Oct 23, 2012]

AcerCloud lets you access your photos, music, videos and documents wirelessly and simultaneously on all devices anytime and anywhere – it enriches your life with more freedom! See how AcerCloud saves Roy from Major embarrassment! -http://bit.ly/AcerCloud

AND BACK THEN: May 9, 2011: Interview [AllThingsD]: Ousted Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci Talks About His Departure

… Lanci said he was pushing the company to become more mobile-focused and more global. Acer, he said, needed to look beyond Taiwan as the world shifted to one in which Intel and Microsoft had less power and computer makers needed to do more work for themselves. … “The real major issue was doing that in Taiwan, this was not possible,” Lanci said. “We needed to go outside Taiwan, be it China or India or even the U.S. or Europe, wherever you can find software resources, software know-how.”

What Lanci wanted to move beyond:

Some highlights of the Acer Global Press Conference held in New York on November 23, 2010. Clear.fi, the Acer media sharing system, evolves with the introduction of some brand new products. Iconia, dual screen device, offers an entirely new touch experience, the new tablets ensure HD entertainment and Alive, the next generation content store, provides users with content tailored to their personal interests.
Dual-screen, multi-touch: ICONIA is the new 14-inches tablet that incorporates the best features of any notebook or tablet device and much more! Thanks to its innovative concept ICONIA was the proud winner of the ‘Last Gadget Standing’ competition at CES 2011, Las Vegas. Welcome to a brand new computing and touch experience!
Take a closer look at liquid mini, the compact and stylish Acer smartphone that packs maximum possibilities in a minimum size. Discover how many features are enclosed in this charming Android smartphone: multi-touch display, 5 megapixels camera, Acer’s exclusive Social Jogger app that integrates updates from your social network accounts into one feed… and much more!
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona the new Acer Iconia Tab family was officially introduced: see here the Iconia Tab A500, with a 10.1 display and Android OS, Iconia Tab A100, 7″ display with Android, and Iconia Tab W500, with 10.1″ display and Windows OS.
NY Global Press Conference, November 23rd, 2010 – Iconia, the outstanding Acer’s dual screen device with all-point multi touch functionality, and the 10.1″ Windows tablet, completely touch screen but also equipped with a docking device that includes a keyboard, introduced by Jim Wong, Senior Corporate Vice President, Acer Group, President ITGO, Acer Inc.
NY Global Press Conference, November 23rd, 2010 – Enter into the world of Clear.fi: the smartest way to enjoy multimedia at home. Jim Wong, Senior Corporate Vice President, Acer Group, President ITGO, Acer Inc., explains that contents stored on any Clear.fi enabled devices can be shared seamlessly with the other devices using the same interface. Take also a look to the new 10.1″ tablet that ensure powerful performances, the 7″ tablet, ideal on the go, and, finally, the 4.8″phone that is a real mini tablet!

 

The Acer Group is the culmination of years of innovation and change. We have become the global group we are today by adhering to the values and principles we established at our foundation. The language of these values may have changed, but our respect for and dedication to them has not.

ACER GROUP CORE VALUES:

The way we must act:
(1) Innovative
(2) Fast
(3) Effective

The pillars on which we must base our actions:

(1) Value Creating
(2) Customer-centric
(3) Ethical
(4) Caring

THE ACER GROUP’S MISSION:

“User-friendly technology makes all the difference in today’s world. Indeed, the innovation and breakthroughs that technology brings can change the course of history.” With this introduction, the Acer Chairman delivers a clear message of the responsibilities and opportunities that technology can provide. Breaking down the barriers between people and technology is not an isolated event. It’s an ongoing process that unlocks our potential to bring innovation to life and embrace the challenges of the future.

As Acer continues to break down barriers, we have the real possibility to make a difference to the world we live in.
J. T. Wang
Chairman, Acer Inc.

  

Lanci, who was replaced as CEO in March, said that the interests that control Acer were worried that his plan would lead to a de-Taiwanization of the company.

“I said, ‘Look, it is not de-Taiwanization,’” he said. “It is just globalization. If we want to be in the top three (PC makers) in the next three to five years, we need to be a global company and we need to leverage resources wherever they are.”

…

Although today’s tablets are a consumer phenomenon, Lanci said the push by Microsoft to deliver Windows on ARM-based chips will help the devices move solidly into the business domain.

“You can easily think about a tablet thin and light, like the current iPad 2,” he said, but offering everything that the PC offers as well. However, he said that Acer needed to do more to prepare for that world. In addition to boosting its own software capabilities, he said the company needed a different relationship with chipmakers. The PC world, he said, was one of buying and selling components, with pricing and availability based solely on volume. The mobile world, he said, is based on close partnerships and strategic alliances.

As for who is doing things right, Apple is clearly winning, but there are others also making moves to adjust for the shifting world.

“I see Samsung is probably doing the right thing,” he said. “HP, maybe. It depends what they are going to do with software and with WebOS.”

However, he said much of the PC industry is in a similar position where Acer was.

So with Acer Chairman and CEO J.T. Wang Tenders Resignation as the result of Acer Q3’13 Financial Results: Consolidated Revenue NT$92.15B (US$3.11B), Operating Loss NT$2.57B (US$86.61M), Intangible Asset Impairment NT$9.94B (US$335.13M) leading PC vendors of the past should take advice from Dell Goes Private: 8 Things To Expect [InformationWeek, Nov 4, 2013]

Dell CEO Michael Dell took the company private to gain more independence from Wall Street investors. Now that the buyout’s cleared, what moves can customers expect?

After eight months of maneuvering, Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell has finally taken the company private. Dell executives remained tightlipped about the buyout as the process wore on, and as the flailing PC market continued to punish the company’s margins. But now that Dell has officially delisted, many of its enterprise customers no doubt are asking the question: How will this affect me?

Many have probably been asking the question for months. Activist investors such as Carl Icahn at times appeared to have the upper hand against Michael Dell. It seemed plausible at points that the founder might be ousted from his own company, or that pieces of the company might be sold off.

And even after it became clear Michael Dell would prevail, questions still remained. Observers widely interpreted that Dell didn’t want the burden of Wall Street’s quarterly scrutiny; after all, it’s hard to invest in new enterprise services when shareholders are howling about PC profits every three months. But now that Dell has rid himself of investor pressure, the question still remains: What will he do with his new flexibility, and how will it help customers?

Dell North America President PH Ferrand spoke withInformationWeek about Dell’s strategy as a privately held company. Here are eight takeaways from the conversation.

1. Dell can make investments as a private company that it couldn’t make as a public company.

Ferrand affirmed one of the buyout process’s dominant narratives: that from Dell’s perspective, Wall Street was more trouble than it was worth. Ferrand said going private will give the company more flexibility. It “might not have been obvious to investors” when the company needed to double down on investments, he said.

2. Dell sees no reason to make a smartphone but will continue to make PCs.

“Very few players make money [selling smartphones],” Ferrand said. “We don’t feel we have to be in the space.”

That’s consistent with what Michael Dell told InformationWeek last year at Dell World. But many of the device manufacturers with which Dell competes have started positioning smartphones as a gateway to consumer sales and BYOD business. Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s device business is a notable example. Execs at HP, another company struggling to adjust to the mobile world, have repeatedly indicated that a smartphone is coming.

Why is Dell still resisting the trend? “The IT market is a $3 trillion business and we are about 2% of that,” Ferrand said. “We don’t need to have phones to get to 3% or 4%.”

Even so, Ferrand said Dell remains committed to PCs and intends to become a leader in the commercial tablet space. He said he can’t rule out a Dell smartphone eventually but predicted that in the meantime, people will soon stop differentiating between tablets and computers; instead, they’ll simply talk broadly about mobile devices. If this revolution in user behavior happens, Dell hopes its Venue 11 Pro tablet will be one of the devices that gets it started; a “three-in-one” device, it attaches to a keyboard to become a laptop and docks to an external monitor to become a desktop replacement.

3. Dell will focus on the hybrid cloud.

Ferrand highlighted hybrid cloud services as a market on which Dell will focus, and which Dell sees as ripe for growth. “We want to dominate hybrid,” he said, explaining that customers want a company that will allow them to be flexible with their data. Customers want to move applications between private and public clouds as they see fit, and they want security from outages and data leaks, he said. He cited some of the investments Dell has already made to fulfill these needs, such as its acquisition of Gale, a company that makes cloud automation tools.

But he said direct relationships with customers would be one of Dell’s defining traits as it builds its cloud business. With competitors such as HP, Microsoft, IBM and others occupying the same space, Dell hopes it can stand out not only with its products but also by serving as a “trusted advisor” for its customers.

4. Dell wants to enable IT to manage BYOD and fragmented workplaces.

Ferrand said device choice has become a smaller part of Dell’s conversations with customers. The reason? Dell’s cloud, virtualization and device management products allow companies to employ applications to whomever needs them, regardless of what kind device the person is using.

“Connecting devices” will be one of Dell’s core competencies as a private company, Ferrand said, and it will involve a variety of products from the company’s existing portfolio, from Wyse technologies for thin clients, to KACE products for management and deployment, to Credent technologies for added security. Device management tools and virtual desktop products are fairly common, but Dell hopes the breadth of its offerings can help it to stand out. This “one-stop shop” mentality plays in the “trusted advisor” persona noted above. Ferrand said the attitude would apply to all Dell’s businesses.

5. Dell will invest in next-gen data center technologies and big-data products.

Ferrand also said Dell would continue to focus on next-generation data center products and big-data applications. The company has already achieved some early momentum with its Active System line ofconverged infrastructure products, as well as its hyperscale servers built around energy-efficient ARM processors. But for both these data centers products and its emerging analytics tools to stand out in the crowded market, Dell will need to continue showing that its software assets are starting to coalesce. The company spent several years acquiring software patents and expertise, but Dell’s success will rely on integrating all of the technologies at the right price and pace.

6. Dell will increase its international sales coverage.

U.S. customers currently account for an inordinate amount of Dell’s business but the company believes emerging markets will be central to its long-term success. Ferrand said the company will continue to participate heavily with channel partners but will also expand its fleet of direct sales representatives throughout the world.

7. Dell will continue to focus on the middle market.

As its enterprise portfolio has expanded, Dell has tried to carve out a niche by delivering enterprise-class resources to SMBs and mid-market customers. Ferrand said Dell will continue this strategy as a private company partly because the middle market contains the largest group of potential customers. But he said this focus also enables Dell to design more flexible products. It’s easier to scale up a mid-market architecture than to affordably repackage one designed for large companies, he said.

8. Dell will execute moves more quickly than in the past.

Ferrand didn’t offer any hints regarding big moves Dell might be planning — such as another major acquisition, or some kind of new product launch. But he said customers can expect Dell to quicken the pace of innovation. As a publicly-traded corporation, the company faced a variety of hurdles in making aggressive moves. But with Michael Dell now securely in the driver’s seat, Ferrand said changes will unroll much more quickly.

2. Taiwan is still confused:

China Times: China’s Internet phenomenon sends warning to Taiwan [Focus Taiwan, Nov 6, 2013]

MomentCam, a mobile app that transforms pictures into cartoons, has quickly shot to popularity since its launch on Aug. 31, drawing 18.24 million users over the past two months.

The Chinese company that developed the app, founded by Ren Xiaoqing, has obtained new investment of 30 million Chinese yuan since the app hit the market.

The success story marks the rise of yet another Chinese Internet entrepreneur after Ma Huateng of Tencent Inc., Jack Ma of Alibaba Group, Yao Jinbo of 58.com Inc., and Zhuang Chenchao of qunar.com.

China’s booming Internet sector stands in sharp contrast to the situation in Taiwan, where the country’s star ICT industry has been losing its luster and the economy remains sluggish.

Taiwan’s ICT companies have hit a bottleneck because they have failed to reposition themselves from contract manufacturers to technology developers. In order to rescue the ICT industry, it is crucial for Taiwan to take part in the thriving Internet economy.

Google Inc. has seen its share price soar from US$85 to over US$1,000 within the nine years since it was launched in 2004, and it currently has a market value of US$338 billion. The market capitalization of Facebook, meanwhile, has reached 1.3 times that of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. — the world’s largest contract chip maker.

Taiwan’s ICT companies must not continue to confine themselves to the contract manufacturing market. The government should promote an alliance between the ICT industries of Taiwan and China and remove the current restrictions on the flows of information, talent and capital across the Taiwan Strait to salvage Taiwan’s dying economy. (Editorial abstract — Nov. 6, 2013)

MomentCam app, China’s latest overnight sensation [WantChinaTimes.com, Nov 6, 2013]

imageThree cartoon portraits made with the MomentCam app. (Internet Photo)
A smartphone application that converts pictures of the user into cute cartoon characters has become a hit overnight in China, with the number of subscribers topping 20 million in the fourth months after its launch.
The application, called MomentCam in English — a phonetic rendering of the Chinese which means “magic manga camera,” rose to the top of the free apps category on the Apple online store in China in just three days and notched a record 3.25 million subscribers a day. On the back of its rapid success, it recently attracted a 10 million yuan (US$1.64 million) loan.
The software was created by two young people, Ren Xiaoqing and Huang Guangming, both members of the Dark Horse Development Camp, a platform dedicated to startups.
Ren Xiaoqian, a fine-arts major, conceived of the idea when working as a souvenir designer for Walmart in the US in 2006. “A popular [design] for Walmart back then was planting a human face on the body of a cartoon character, although the effect was quite ugly as well as the dark background. This gave me the idea to render photographs of people in a cartoony comic style, believing that it would be even more popular,” Ren said.
In 2008, she encountered Huang Guangming, then a manager at Microsoft, and they decided to combine their respective expertise in the fields of fine art and computing by returning to China to found a startup.
The company initially dedicated itself to the production of custom-made cartoon souvenirs for some major local companies before Ren decided to switch to online business entirely due to the ceiling for offline products and her dislike of the need to entertain clients to drum up business.
From a slow start, the MomentCam app suddenly became a hit overnight. “We were not mentally prepared for the phenomenal growth of subscribers,” Ren admitted. The number of downloads topped 1 million in one month and 10 million in three months as people became aware of the software, which converts a photograph of a human into a cartoon figure in the space of a few seconds.
Ren said the challenge now is how to maintain the number of subscribers to avoid it becoming a short-lived fad, a fate that has befallen a great many applications in China.

Windows 8.1 tablet sales 20-30% below expectations [DIGITIMES, Oct 31, 2013]

Channel retailers are seeing their Windows 8.1-based tablet sales in October 20-30% below than their original expectations, despite strong price/performance ratios.

Asustek Computer’s recently released Transformer Book T100 is priced at US$349 for a 32GB model and US$399 for 64GB and after bundling with telecom services, the 64GB model’s price drops from NT$12,900 (US$438) to NT$5,000-6,000 in Taiwan.

Sources from channel retailers pointed out that the weakening Windows 8.1 tablet demand is due to competition from PC and Android-based tablets. Most of these products have received price cuts after the release of Windows 8.1-based 2-in-1 devices.

Since Windows 8.1-based tablets are starting to face problems similar to those of previous Windows-based models, the sources are concerned that inventory issues may rise again in 2014.

So far, channel retailers have not yet received any word about price cuts from brand vendors, but some retailers expect Windows 8.1 tablets to receive over 20% discounts in December for the year-end shopping season.

Dell expected to overtake Acer to become third-largest notebook vendor in 2014, say Taiwan makers [DIGITIMES, Sept 17, 2013]

Microsoft’s ending Windows XP technical support in April 2014 has triggered growing replacement of business-use notebooks, and this is expected to significantly benefit Dell because Dell has more focus on business-use modes than other notebook vendors, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers. Consequently, Dell is expected to surpass Acer to become the global third-largest notebook vendor in 2014.

Notebook vendors normally do not rely on business-use models for volume shipments mainly because sales are subject to the government sector’s and enterprises’ procurement scheduling, the sources indicated. But while demand for consumer notebooks has been shrinking due to competition from tablets and smartphones, business-use models have become the main source of growth for notebook vendors, the sources said.

Dell is expected to continue to focus on the business-use market segment, especially after its privatization, the sources noted. Dell shipped 9.285 million notebooks globally in the first half of 2013, ranking fourth next to Acer’s shipments of 9.814 million units, the sources cited IDC statistics as indicating.

Commentary: Suppliers need to prepare for Dell strategy change [DIGITIMES, Sept 27, 2013]

As Dell is expected to become privatized, Taiwan’s upstream component suppliers may need to start preparing for the US vendor’s business reorganization.
Michael Dell previously said that the company will accelerate its reorganization after becoming privatized and though the PC business will not be abandoned, it will surely no longer be the major focus of the US vendor.
Dell’s financial report for the second quarter showed that the company still had about 33% of profits coming from computing-related product lines including desktops, notebooks and tablets. However, as the PC industry continues to decline, placing less emphasis on the PC business is a path Dell is likely to take in order to achieve growth in the future.
The PC industry has already been shrinking for two consecutive years and is expected to continue declining in 2014. Although Wintel has been aggressively releasing new products and cutting prices, it has been unable to stimulate PC demand. This is a clear indication that the industry has already entered the decline stage and users may only replace their PC products when they are no long functional.
PCs still have low penetration in emerging markets, but as consumers of these markets are also having high interest in smartphones and tablets, the PC industry is unlikely to return to a growth track through these markets.
With the integration between software and hardware becoming a new trend of the IT market, upstream suppliers may also need to start preparing for Dell’s future strategy of combining software design with hardware products.

Dell optimistic about Windows 8.1 for enterprise PCs [DIGITIMES, Aug 29, 2013]

As Microsoft is ready to release Windows 8.1 on October 18, Jeff Clarke, Dell’s vice chairman and president of Global Operations and End User Computing Solutions, has expressed his optimism about the operating system. Compared to Android and iOS, Windows’ security and management abilities will allow the OS to become the top pick of the enterprise PC industry, Clarke noted.

Although Clarke has mentioned that Dell is planning to release several Windows-based tablets in the second half, he has not provided much detail for the related plans.

However, sources from the upstream supply chain has revealed that Dell is currently planning to release an 8-inch Windows-based tablet in the second half, targeting mainly the enterprise market.

In addition, Dell is also considering releasing a 10.6-inch Windows tablet, adopting either a Core i or an Atom processor, the sources added.

Dell aims to strengthen software businesses in Greater China [DIGITIMES, June 24, 2013]

Dell has set up four major departments, End-User Computing, Enterprise Solutions Group (ESG), Dell Software Group (DSG) and Services, and plans to strengthen businesses in Greater China in 2013.
The DSG was established earlier in 2013, while the Service department was formed only three years ago. With the four departments, Dell is able to push complete solutions as well as increase service consulting for its clients in Greater China.
Dell has been acquiring solution providers in the market since 2010 and has acquired players such as Kace, SonicWall and Quest. Thanks to the acquisitions, Dell Taiwan’s software solution business currently has over one thousand clients that are using its solution services including datacenter, cloud computing, information and data management, mobile office management and security and data protection.
Currently, Dell has about 40-50 service consultants for the Greater China region and is currently hiring more to support demand from the information and data management service sectors.
Dell Taiwan president Terence Liao pointed out that Dell’s global revenues in 2012 were about US$50 billion and the software segment contributed about US$1.5 billion. Since Dell Taiwan’s software business also shared a similar proportion, it shows that the software business has already become a focus at Dell.
In the future, Liao expects Dell Taiwan’s sales growth to be driven mainly by cloud computing and security and data protection services, and therefore will offer promotions to push the two services in the channel.

3. How Acer’s “new strategy” that has been in place since April 1, 2011 came to an end:

FOCUS TAIWAN – CNA ENGLISH NEWS:

May 8, 2013: Acer forecasts shipment growth in Q2 (update)

Taiwanese computer maker Acer Inc. said Wednesday that it is aiming for single-digit growth in shipments in the current quarter after returning to profitability in the first quarter.
Acer Corporate President Jim Wong told an investor conference that he expects shipments of Acer’s notebooks, netbooks and tablets to remain flat or increase by up to 5 percent in the second quarter.
The company said its total PC shipments fell 11 percent sequentially in the first quarter, but it did not disclose the actual number of units shipped.
According to data compiled by research firm International Data Corp. (IDC), Acer shipments plunged 31.3 percent year-on-year to 6.15 million units in the first quarter, well below the industry’s average of a 13.9 percent decline.
Wong said touch-enabled notebooks are expected to account for about 25 percent of Acer’s total notebook shipments in the second quarter, and that the ratio is likely to hit 30 to 35 percent by the end of the year.
J.T. Wang, Acer’s chairman and chief executive officer, said his company plans to break even in the second quarter, when the shipping quantity of its touch notebooks is expected to double those shipped in the first quarter.
He said Acer will continue to make more efforts in customer-centric designs and marketing to help the company regain growth momentum in the next decade.
“Our approach is to focus on driving valuable growth that is profitable and enhances Acer brand value,” Wang said.
The company’s operating margin in the quarter was 0.03 percent, and it had consolidated revenue of NT$91.7 billion (US$3.08 billion), down 9.4 percent from the previous quarter due to seasonal factors.
The company’s first quarter net income was NT$515 million, or NT$0.19 per share, derived mainly from non-operating income such as foreign exchange gains and the disposal of stock.
Acer’s operating income was NT$29 million, compared with an operating loss of NT$3.37 billion in the fourth quarter of last year that included a NT$3.5 billion intangible asset impairment charge for the loss in value of its rights to four trademarks.
Acer unveiled a series of Windows 8-based laptops and tablets in New York on May 3 in a bid to boost shipments and strengthen its bottom line, but the company is still struggling to cope with weak PC demand and strong competition from other brands.
Kirk Yang, a Hong Kong-based analyst at British banking group Barclays Plc, said Acer’s operating margin of 0.03 percent was much lower than his forecast of 0.18 percent and a consensus estimate of 0.17 percent by Bloomberg.
“We expect Acer to guide revenue to grow by single digits sequentially, after posting quarter-on-quarter revenue contraction for five quarters in a row,” Yang said in a note to clients before the investor meeting.
“However, we estimate that Acer’s operating margin in the second quarter of 2013 will not see any meaningful recovery due to weakening global PC demand and more low-priced tablet PC shipments in the mix,” he wrote.
Barclays forecast that Acer’s sales revenue will grow 4.8 percent for the whole of 2013, with its operating margin improved to 0.8 percent. It maintained an “equal-weight” rating and a target price of NT$24 on the stock.
Acer shares closed up 2.26 percent at NT$24.85 before the announcement of the quarterly results.

August 8, 2013: Acer aiming to break even in Q3

Taiwanese computer maker Acer Inc. said Thursday it expects to break even or record a small operating loss in the third quarter of 2013, despite its disappointing results in the previous quarter.
The company’s mobile PC shipments — including notebooks, netbooks and tablets — are forecast to grow by 0-5 percent sequentially in the third quarter, Acer Corporate President Jim Wong told investors in a conference call.
However, Acer has lowered its annual tablet shipment target to between 5.5 million and 6.5 million units, from its projection in May of 5 million to 10 million units, Wong said.
He said touch-enabled notebooks will account for 20-25 percent of Acer’s total laptop shipments this year, below its previous estimate of 30 percent, in light of weakening demand for such products.
“I think applications are most important. Today, there are still no killer applications for touch (notebooks),” Wong said in the conference call.
Asked about Acer’s full-year outlook, he said the company is trying to “sustain its market share while protecting its bottom line.”
The company is aiming to stay profitable in 2013 after registering losses over the past two years, Wong indicated.
J.T. Wang, Acer’s chairman and chief executive officer, said the company is expanding its non-Windows business, including Android-based tablets and smartphones, as well as the web-centric Chromebook laptops promoted by Google Inc.
Non-Windows business is expected to make up 10-12 percent of Acer’s revenue this year and 20-30 percent next year, Wang said.
Acer reported an operating loss of NT$613 million (US$20.47 million) for the second quarter – following six consecutive quarters of operating profit — because of increasing investment and the rising cost of memory chips.
For the first six months of 2013, the Taiwanese PC maker’s consolidated revenue fell 18.9 percent year-on-year to NT$181.35 billion, resulting in an operating loss of NT$585 million and earnings per share of NT$0.06.
British bank Barclays Plc maintained its “equal-weight” rating on Acer shares and cut its earnings per share estimates by 5.4 percent for 2013, and by 5.3 percent for 2014, forecasting a contraction in Acer’s sales and more competition pressure.
“We expect Acer’s sales to continue to be weak and do not expect any further momentum currently,” Kirk Yang, head of Asia ex-Japan Tech Hardware Research at Barclays, said in a research note dated Aug. 6.
“We expect Acer will face a more competitive situation in the tablet and notebook segments in the near term and we don’t see it having an obvious plan in place to react,” said Yang, who reduced his price target on the stock from NT$24 to NT$23.
Acer shares ended 3.97 percent lower at NT$20.55 Thursday on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.

August 30, 2013: Talk of the Day — Will Acer be sold or merged?

Acer Inc., Taiwan’s leading computer vendor, has seen its share price plunge to historically low levels in recent months.
Market sources said earlier this week that investment banks are planning to broker a merger between Acer and one of two major rivals — Taiwan’s AsusTek Computer or China’s Lenovo Group.
Acer founder Stan Shih said Thursday that he had an open mind toward such an overture.
“I would let nature take its course,” Shih said, but he added that no investment bankers have approached him for such talks.
In charting the company’s future development strategy or direction, Shih said, the rights and interests of all stakeholders, including employees, shareholders and society at large, should be priority concerns.
Shih has retired and is no longer involved in Acer’s management, but he remains the company’s largest shareholder, controlling 2.64 percent of its shares. His wife has a similar sized stake in the company.
Shares of Acer gained 2.57 percent to close at NT$19.95 Friday.
The following are excerpts from local media coverage of Shih’s views on Acer’s future:
Economic Daily News:
Acer spokesman Henry Wang said Thursday that the company has never thought about a merger with any other corporation.
“We are restructuring and streamlining our operations, and focusing more on innovating,” Wang said.
While the company is tapping into the ever-expanding tablet market to help compensate for declining PC sales, it has also launched a new generation of laptops and desktops, including an ultra-thin laptop-tablet hybrid, he said.
In the past, some foreign analysts have suggested that Taiwan’s two leading PC makers — Acer and AsusTek — should merge to expand their operating scale and enhance their international competitiveness.
Acer Chairman J.T. Wang also said previously that Lenovo, which has emerged as the world’s second largest PC vendor and has a comprehensive portfolio of products, proposed a few years ago to buy out Acer, but Wang said he politely rejected such an offer.
On Thursday, Stan Shih was asked to comment on reports that investment banks intend to mediate an Acer-AsusTek merger or an Acer-Lenovo merger.
Shih said Acer is not a company that can be evaluated solely in financial terms.
“Capitalists tend to assess things simply in monetary terms, but Acer has something invaluable,” Shih said.
As one of Taiwan’s few international brands, Shih said, Acer has come a long way and overcome numerous challenges in building up its brand recognition.
“I hope local people will give Acer more encouragement and support,” Shih said. (Aug. 30, 2013).
China Times:
Shih said a company’s share price is not the sole indicator used to assess a company’s value.
“I have not been bothered by fluctuations in Acer’s share price,” Shih said Thursday when chairing an event marking the start of applications for this year’s Acer Digital Award.
But he added that the PC industry is changing rapidly.
“We should let nature take its course. If somebody wants to take over Acer at a price beyond what anybody could imagine and create an even better brand based on it, why we should resist such a deal,” he said. (Aug. 30, 2013).

May 11, 2013: Acer, Asustek upbeat about Windows 8 market reception

Taiwan-based Acer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc., two of the world’s leading personal computer vendors, are optimistic about the market reception of Microsoft Corp.’s latest operating system Windows 8, which is to be revamped, market sources said Saturday.
Acer Chairman J.T. Wang said Microsoft is eager to communicate with hardware device providers like Acer in an attempt to improve the Windows 8 functions and make the platform more user-friendly.
Amid lackluster market reception since the new Microsoft operating system was launched at the end of October 2012, the U.S.-based software giant said it is planning to revamp the OS so that consumers will learn how to use the new platform more quickly.
The plan to launch a new version of Windows 8 was announced after Tami Reller, Microsoft’s chief marketing and financial officer, conceded that it was not easy for consumers to get used to the platform.
Many business users have been urging Microsoft to restore the “Start” button in its latest OS. In the earlier Windows versions, the icon appears in the lower-left corner of the computer screen, but is not visible in the latest software.
To stir up buying interest, Microsoft has lowered its royalties by US$20-US$30 (NT$600-NT$1,000) on touch notebook computers 11.6 inches or smaller, while offering incentives to distributors of Windows 8 tablet computers.
Market sources said Microsoft is expected to cut its royalties on Windows 8 tablet computers so that they can be sold at around US$199-US$349 and thus make them more competitive in the market.
Wang said the changes in Microsoft’s strategy will have a positive effect on market reception of the Windows 8 OS and also on the future development of the PC industry.
Acer said that with touch devices becoming the mainstream in the PC market, it will continue to unveil tablets, touch ultrabook computers, and combination PCs and smartphones, all running either Windows 8 or Google’s Android operating system.
Meanwhile, Asustek said Windows 8 is a good product, although some consumers have not gotten used to it. Once Microsoft revamps the OS, sales of Windows 8 mobile devices will pick up, Asustek said.

June 3, 2013: COMPUTEX: Acer unveils new product lines

imageAcer Chairman J.T. Wang (left) holds the 8-inch Iconia W3,
and Chief Marketing Officer Michael Birkin holds the 5.7-inch Liquid S1.

Taiwanese computer maker Acer Inc. unveiled a series of new products Monday, including an 8-inch Windows tablet and a 5.7-inch phablet.

At an international press conference held under the theme of “Redefining Technology Through Touch,” Acer showcased a wide array of its latest products one day ahead of Asia’s largest computer trade show.

The 8-inch Iconia W3, one of the first 8-inch Windows tablets on the market, weighs 500 grams and is less than half an inch thick. With a battery life of eight hours, the device can beam out 720p video playback on a 1,280 x 800 display. It also comes with an optional full-size keyboard.

The company also displayed its first phone-tablet hybrid product, the Liquid S1, with the aim of gaining traction in the fast-growing hybrid market.

The new quad-core phablet features a 5.7-inch 720p display, weighs 195 grams and runs on Google’s Android 4.2 operating system.

Acer projected that the global phablet market will grow to about 10 million units in 2013, up from between 7 million and 8 million units last year.

June 3, 2013: COMPUTEX: Acer unveils new product lines (update)

Acer Chairman J.T. Wang said on the sidelines of the launch ceremony that touch technology applications have become all the rage, and this will continue in the future.

“It’s all about touch,” he said, adding that the launch of the new products is expected to meet consumer demand.

4. The road which lead to Acer downfall:

Acer press release:

March 31, 2011: Acer CEO and President Gianfranco Lanci resigns – With immediate effect

Gianfranco Lanci is appointed President of Acer Inc., effective January 2005 … Current President, J.T. Wang, will step into the role of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) as Stan Shih retires from Acer at the end of this year. The new positions are effective from 1 January 2005. Lanci’s designation marks Acer’s appreciation for his outstanding performance in the European market, including his management style and successful business model – which may now extend to the Acer group worldwide. …
Acer’s Lanci Takes Over CEO Role [IDG News Service, June 13, 2008] … Gianfranco Lanci, who came to Acer from Texas Instruments (TI) when Acer bought the TravelMate laptop PC business from TI in 1997, will add the CEO position to his current role as president of Acer.
The company’s laptop business has been a driving force in its double-digit growth over the past few years and helped catapult Acer into the number-three spot in the PC industry.
J.T. Wang, the current chairman of Acer, relinquished his CEO title at Acer but took on the title of Acer Group CEO on Friday, Acer said in a statement.
Wang took over as chairman at Acer from company founder Stan Shih several years ago, after Acer split itself into three distinct companies in order to separate its branded business from its contract manufacturing operations. Acer took over as the branded company, while Wistron took most of the PC-related contract manufacturing and BenQ took on mobile phone and PC-related work.
Shih retired from Acer in December 2004.
Acer CEO and President Gianfranco Lanci has resigned from the company, with immediate effect. Acer Chairman J.T. Wang takes acting role in the interim. The company has commenced with the planning of organizational and operational adjustments for the sustainable future of Acer.
The resignation was approved at a meeting of Acer’s Board of Directors today, and the company has communicated internally with its worldwide employees.

On the company’s future development, Lanci held different views from a majority of the board members, and could not reach a consensus following several months’ of dialog. They placed different levels of importance on scale, growth, customer value creation, brand position enhancement, and on resource allocation and methods of implementation.

The change does not affect current operations which are functioning as normal. Acer’s strong management team of multi-nationals has been well-informed and is committed to overseeing and implementing the company strategies, as does the amicable company relations with industry partners persist. Acer will continue to push for globalization, follow its multi-brand and channel business model, develop competitive products and services, and foster closer relations with key vendors and channel partners.

Acer Chairman, J.T. Wang expresses, “The personal computer remains the core of our business. We have built up a strong foundation and will continue to expand within, especially in the commercial PC segment. In addition, we are stepping into the new mobile device market, where we will invest cautiously and aim to become one of the leading players.”

“In this new ICT industry,” continued Wang, “Acer needs a period of time for adjustment. With the spirit of entrepreneurship, we will face new challenges and look to the future with confidence.”

In his role as President and CEO, Lanci has contributed significantly toward Acer’s growth. The company expresses its true appreciation for Lanci’s efforts and wishes him all the best in his future endeavors.

April 19, 2011: Acer appoints Jim Wong as Corporate President – Through teamwork, company to face challenges and embrace opportunities of the new ICT industry

Acer Inc.’s board of directors has approved the candidacy of Jim Wong as the new Corporate President, with immediate effect. Wong previously held the positions of corporate senior vice president and president of IT Products Group (ITGO). Together with Chairman and CEO, J.T. Wang, they will lead the company forward to embrace new challenges and opportunities in the new ICT age.

Acer Chairman and CEO, J.T. Wang … “As the ICT industry shifts from single to multiple operating system platforms, it opens up new challenges as well as new opportunities. Acer needs a leader who is familiar with technology, as well as understands the market. We reviewed Jim’s potential and agreed he would fit well in the role.”

The rapid growth from data-creation to data-consumption devices is increasing the ICT market scale and opening up new prospects. Acer will aggressively yet cautiously develop data-consumption products, tablet PCs and smartphones based on the solid foundation of the main PC business.

Jim Wong, new corporate president of Acer states, “The IT industry is encountering a profound change. I foresee many new opportunities and am ready to face the challenges ahead. I will encourage teamwork throughout the company and work closely with the new management team. We are ready with a clear set of goals and action plans.”

In the PC business, Acer will continue to seek volume/shipment growth, but we must optimize our multi-brand strategy by having clear differentiation of the brands’ positioning and create value for our customers. Concurrently, Acer shall focus on developing selective models for mobile devices to lay a solid foundation for the future.
Three key principles have been defined by Acer’s new management to ensure successful decision making:

  • Promote the spirit of teamwork to enhance company’s overall competitiveness, and encourage closer communication between front-end and back-end management teams for better mutual understanding.
  • Simplify operational systems and processes to boost effectiveness and speed.
  • Strengthen corporate governance and enhance company sustainability.

Wong joined Acer in 1986, with experience in sales, product marketing, product development, with a keen understanding of ODM supplier operations and the brand business. In 2001 when he took charge of the ITGO, he has been one of the core members of Acer’s top management team. In 2005 he was promoted to corporate senior vice president.

Born in 1958, Wong holds a bachelor degree, majoring in mathematics from Soochow University in Taiwan, and an MBA from Emory University, Georgia, USA.  In 1999 he received Taiwan’s 17th Annual Management of Excellency Award.

Acer ICONIA [press release, Nov 23, 2011]

Not so long ago mobile computing devices with touch screens were only found in science fiction. Now Acer presents ICONIA, a new concept device set to add a brand new tablet experience, combining the versatility of a conventional 14” form factor with a unique dual-screen layout and highly intuitive all-point multi-touch functionality, which means you can use all the fingers of your hands to navigate ICONIA.

If you are looking for a different and innovative approach to personal computing, look no further. With its two all-point multi-touch displays Acer ICONIA offers an enhanced content consumption experience and brings the interaction with the tablet to a new level.

Multimedia, entertainment, communication, web browsing and office productivity seamlessly flow across the dual screen, allowing users to set the best scenario for what they are doing. To improve readability of web sites or documents, the window can be spread across both screens. But the dual screen also means you can do one thing in one screen and something else entirely on the other: you can browse a website on the top screen and view the contents of your favourite folder on the bottom one or you can watch a video on the top screen and check out your multimedia library in the other.

“We took this insight and created a range of easy to use devices with touch technology including Smartphones, Notebooks, AIO PCs, Tablet and our latest addition, the ICONIA Touchbook: this level of commitment to touch technology is something no other PC vendor can compete with.” states Jim Wong Acer Inc. Vice President and ITGO President. “The Intel® Core™ i5 processor together with our experience with touch technology has allowed us to completely remap the user experience to create a far more natural interaction with our devices.

April 19, 2011: Acer establishes Touch Business Group to enhance development of new mobile devices

  • Acer Corporate President Jim Wong to lead Touch Business Group
  • Campbell Kan to lead PC Global Operations
  • Walter Deppeler to lead Chief Marketing Office

Acer Inc. announces organizational adjustments in separating the back-end product-line operations into two independent entities: Touch Business Group (Touch BG) and PC Global Operations (PCGO) lead by new Acer corporate president, Jim Wong, and Campbell Kan, former VP of the smart handheld business unit, respectively. In addition, Acer announces new functions for mid- and long-term business planning and operation analysis.

To make significant inroads in the mobile device business, Acer has reorganized the former IT product global operations into two independent entities. The newly founded Touch BG comprises of the former tablet PC and smartphone teams, while the PCGO consists of the main PC product lines.

The Touch BG shall be led by new Acer corporate president, Jim Wong, and president of Eten Information Systems, Simon Hwang, concurrently appointed deputy president of Touch BG.

Acer president, Jim Wong, states, “Touch/mobile devices open up a host of new opportunities. They form Acer’s new business and growth engine for the future. To focus on this market, we saw the need to allocate sufficient resources, and devise a new management structure different from the PC business specifically for this line of business.”

New Functions
Acer also creates three new functions deemed necessary for company’s competitive development, they are: Chief Marketing Office (CMO) – responsible for brand position and marketing strategy; Chief Technology Office (CTO) – responsible for mid to long term planning and integration of technologies; and Operation Analysis Office (OAO) – for studying and analyzing company business models and financial affairs.

Senior corporate VP and EMEA president, Walter Deppeler, shall concurrently serve as CMO, while Tiffany Huang, AVP of supply chain operations will concurrently oversee the OAO. The CTO will be jointly led by former VP of quality and service, Jackson Lin, former CTO of products development, R.C. Chang, and former VP of technology center, Arif Maskatia.

May 26, 2011: Acer’s manufacturing base in Chongqing commences operation – Ceremony to mark milestone achievement joined by Mayor Huang Qifan and Acer President Jim Wongise competitiveness on a global scale.

Acer’s new global IT manufacturing center in Chongqing has commenced production. Today a ceremony attended by Chongqing Mayor Huang Qifan and Acer President Jim Wong was held to mark this achievement. The city of Chongqing in western China offers excellent infrastructure including land and air transportation, and stable manpower supply. The newly operational manufacturing center is expected to enhance Acer’s worldwide business and logistics to boost overall competitiveness.

Acer President, Jim Wong, remarked, “Our decision to go west in China is a global strategy. Since December last year, the steps in setting up this manufacturing base have been smooth, enabling our production start in May. Acer is extremely grateful for the support of the Chongqing government and our manufacturing partners to make this a possibility.”

“Major OEM companies have already set foot in Chongqing and all will begin shipping by the second half of this year,” continued Wong. “Key component suppliers have also set up presence here to create a complete supply chain. To begin with, we will produce our notebook and netbook PCs in Chongqing and gradually expand our manufacturing volume. By the end of 2011, 30-40% of our total notebook and netbook PCs will be produced here.”

June 1, 2011: Acer Chairman & CEO to relinquish his remuneration

Acer Chairman and CEO J.T. Wang is taking responsibility of the one-time write-off totaling US$150 million by relinquishing total remuneration from his position as director of the company board, as well as employee bonus of  2010.

With Acer’s substantial loss in write-off, Wang deeply feels regretful of the current situation and will dedicate his efforts fully to investigating the reasons behind the loss and to improving internal management.

July 18, 2011: Dave Chan appointed General Manager of China Operations, Acer Touch Business Group – Focus on penetration into China touch mobile device market

Global IT industry veteran, Dave Chan, has been appointed General Manager of China Operations, Acer Touch Business Group. Under Chan’s leadership, Acer expects to accelerate penetration into China’s smartphone and tablet PC market.

Chan has been working in the high-tech industry for more than 20 years, accumulating a wealth of experience in the consumer/retail business and operations with extensive geographic experiences ranging from global, regional (Asia) and country (China). Prior to this, he served as senior official for eight years at a first-tier IT company, responsible for notebooks, smartphones and tablet PCs in China.

Acer Corporate President, Jim Wong, said, “Touch mobile device is Acer’s new strategic business. While China’s huge IT market, with unique applications and customer segment, presents great business potential. To address these specific needs, we established a separate business group overseeing the China touch mobile device market and will allocate the needed human resource.”

“Dave will lead Acer’s touch business development team in China,” continued Wong, “cooperate with local telcos and operators on R&D, software, sales and services. His joining ensures that Acer has substantial leadership to steer this new business forward in China.”

To make significant inroads in the mobile device business, Acer announced in April the newly founded Touch Business Group comprising of the former tablet PC and smartphone teams, and directly overseen by Wong.
Chan holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Oregon State University and MBA from Santa Clara University.

July 18, 2011: Acer sets up global R&D center in Chongqing – Focus on smart handheld application software and services

A new global R&D center, Acer Intellectual (Chongqing) Co. Ltd., was inaugurated today to enhance Acer’s development in smartphones and tablet PCs. The center shall cooperate with Chongqing municipal government and China Mobile Ltd. in researching and developing smart handheld devices as well as related software and services.

An inaugural ceremony was held today and joined by Chongqing government officials, during which Acer also signed an agreement with Chongqing Economic and IT Commission (CQEIC) and China Mobile’s Chongqing subsidiary (Chongqing Mobile) to jointly research and develop smart handheld devices, including smartphones and tablet PCs, application software and services.

…

To begin with, Acer will invest US$4 million in Acer Intellectual (Chongqing) Co. The center, led by Acer Corporate President Jim Wong, will also focus on the smart handheld user behavior study in the China market.

Acer’s R&D taskforce has already begun collaborating with Chongqing Mobile and local IT companies to successfully develop software applications for Android based TD (time domain) smartphones; the applications are used by Chongqing civil servants. Further on, together with Chongqing government, the center will develop smart handheld mobile terminals to provide more value-added services.

January 8, 2012: Acer Unveils World’s Thinnest Ultrabook: Aspire S5

“The Ultrabook is much more than just a product segment,” said Jim Wong, president of Acer Inc. “It’s a new trend that will become the mainstream for mobile PCs, and customers will see the unique features gradually extended across Acer’s notebook family.”

January 8, 2012: AcerCloud Connects All Personal Devices Securely for Anytime, Anywhere Access to Digital Media and Data

Acer today previewed its upcoming AcerCloud, which securely connects all personal smart devices for anytime, anywhere access. Featuring Acer Always Connect technology, users can retrieve multimedia and data files anytime, even when their main PC is in sleep (standby/hibernation) mode. Users can enjoy these advantages knowing that their information is stored and transferred securely via strong encryption and authentication. Bringing users tremendous functionality and value, Acer will include the AcerCloud, without additional cost, on all new Acer consumer PCs.

Acer reduces the complexities of today’s fast-paced lifestyles by developing solutions that enable devices to communicate, simplifying the process of content sharing. With the ever-growing number of smart digital devices, users need to share and back up their multimedia and data files in a simple, smart way.

…

Acer Inc. President Jim Wong stated, “AcerCloud not only provides the simplicity and efficiency when accessing and sharing data, but it’s also free with a new Acer PC and gives our users peace-of-mind, knowing that their data is safely transferred in a personal cloud space.”

AcerCloud will be bundled on all Acer consumer PCs starting Q2 2012. It will support all Android devices, while future support is planned for Windows-based devices. The service will be available in America, Europe, Asia and China.

August 30, 2012: Acer Steps Up Marketing, Engages Red Peak Group and Appoints Michael Birkin as Chief Marketing Officer

To energize and strengthen Acer’s global marketing organization, Acer will engage Red Peak Group, a global marketing services firm, and appoint Red Peak Chairman Michael Birkin as Acer Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). This strategic move is aimed at strengthening Acer as a marketing-oriented company.

Red Peak will assign Birkin and other Red Peak members to perform related marketing functions and services for Acer. And as CMO, Birkin will lead the global brand marketing team, and report directly to Acer’s chairman and CEO, commencing October 1, 2012.

According to Acer Chairman and CEO, J.T. Wang, “Our key objectives for Red Peak are to enhance Acer’s marketing strengths and help steer the existing company mindset.”

“In the product development stages, we will place marketing ahead of R&D and design,” said Wang. “Our precise understanding of customers’ needs will lead the way in products and services development. We will build an end-to-end marketing environment and enhance our marketing-oriented mindset.”

Birkin is regarded as one of the world’s most respected brand strategists and marketing experts. During his career he served as the CEO of Interbrand Group, the brand consultancy, and worked in various capacities at Omnicom, the global advertising and marketing communications services group. In 2010, Birkin founded the Red Peak Group, a marketing services company with offices in New York, London and Los Angeles, offering a full range of services including brand consulting and design.

In addition to the marketing organization and personnel changes, the incumbent CMO Walter Deppeler, has been assigned to lead a newly established marketing committee as Chairman, responsible for integrating Acer’s global branding and marketing strategy.

June 4, 2012: Acer Unveils Windows® 8 PC Lineup: Ultrabooks™, Tablets, and AIO Desktops – Creating a world of explorers through transformational user experiences

Acer today announces its series of Windows 8-based products, which includes the premium Aspire S7 Ultrabook™, ICONIA W Series tablets, and Aspire U Series all-in-one (AIO) desktops, all featuring innovative ergonomic designs and appealing beauty that deliver greater convenience and delight to the overall user experience.
“It is a watershed moment for Acer,” says J.T. Wang, Chairman and CEO of Acer Inc. “Acer has always been committed to breaking the barriers between people and technology and the leading design of these products, when coupled with the Windows® 8 touch functions, will provide transformational experiences for users whether they are creating important output or simply being entertained.”
Jim Wong, Corporate President of Acer Inc. comments, “Acer collaborated closely with Microsoft Corp. and has taken the lead to engineer new products that will be great with Windows® 8, demonstrating our product development efficiencies and taking advantage of our ability to provide an enhanced and satisfying computing experience. By focusing on ergonomics and style, we are addressing key consumer demands.”
Wong continues: “Interaction between human beings and computers should be easy rather than complex. In our view, the touchscreen experience enabled by Windows® 8 is a massive step forward – simply because it makes computing more intuitive by offering users a backward in interface. We understand Windows® 8 innovation and benefits and by utilizing Intel’s architecture and platform performance on our products, we believe we will provide users a better touch experience across devices for both consumer and commercial products.”
“Microsoft and Acer have been working together on new devices for Windows® 8, and it’s great to see the progress Acer is making,” says Steven Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President, OEM Division, Microsoft Corp. “We expect customers to have a great experience using the combination of Windows® 8 and the new hardware designs from Acer.”
“Intel and Acer continue to focus on innovation and collaboration delivering engaging and secure user experiences,” says Kirk Skaugen, Vice President and General Manager, PC Client Group of Intel Corp. “Combined with the increased responsiveness of Intel’s 3rd generation Intel Core processor, new breakthrough capabilities possible with future Microsoft Windows® 8, and the added flexibility of touch, the Acer Aspire Ultrabook™ will provide a magnificent experience for users.”
Wong says further, “At CES we announced Acer’s new brand positioning, the visible statement of which is to explore beyond limits. Today’s announcement is the most significant yet in our goal to create a modern day explorer in everyone. Our new products are 100% designed and created to enable anyone to accomplish more whether they be an individual or a business.”
In the development of the new product lineup, Acer has been working even more closely with Microsoft and Intel.
PRODUCT INFORMATION
The Aspire S7 Ultrabook™ — the premium model in the S Series — boasts a sleek aluminum unibody design. The 13.1-inch model is currently the thinnest Full HD touch Ultrabook™ and features glossy tempered glass, while the 11.6-inch model is the smallest Full HD touch-enabled Ultrabook™. Both devices are kitted out with the innovative Acer Twin Air cooling system for best thermal comfort, as well as a light-sensing keyboard that adjusts its backlight to facilitate typing, even in low light.
The ICONIA W510 and W700 tablets have raised touch functionality to the next level. The W510 is equipped with a 10.1-inch display and has tri-mode touch, which allows users to touch, type and view. It also delivers up to 18 hours of battery life and headlines Always On, Always Connect technology. The W700 is the best-performing Windows tablet with a versatile cradle that is adjustable for different viewing requirements while offering data storage expansion and an additional battery. Sporting an 11.6-inch Full HD touchscreen, this tablet stuns with high-quality 1080p images.
Aspire U Series AIO desktops are also available in two sizes. The 27-inch 7600U has an ultra-slim 35 mm profile and a gorgeous Full HD edge-to-edge screen and Dolby® Surround Sound. This AIO features multi-user touch, and can be tilted from 0 to 90 degrees. Furthermore, the screen can swivel to all sides when laid flat. The 23-inch 5600U is the slimmest AIO PC that can tilt from 30 to 85 degrees, enhancing personal touch use. Both models have leading ergonomic designs, and a slim, stylish finish that complements interior decor.

October 30, 2012: Acer Aspire S7 Series The Thinnest and Lightest “Touch & Type” Ultrabooks™

First previewed at Computex Taipei, the Acer Aspire S7 Series, the thinnest and lightest Ultrabooks™, has been hailed as one of the most exciting Windows 8-based touch Ultrabooks to launch. It was also featured prominently in Microsoft’s launch event in New York and highlighted as one of the best PCs ever made. The positive reviews have been unparalleled.

As thin as a smartphone, the S7 is an iconic combination of power and beauty. The use of straight lines, glossy white glass, electroluminescent lighting and anodized aluminum have culminated in an Ultrabook that champions cutting-edge technology and innovative design. The dual torque hinge and Acer Green Instant On / Always Connect features ensure the ultimate in control and seamless usability.

“Acer took a fresh approach to the design and development of the Aspire S7, using premium construction methods and materials,” said Jim Wong, corporate president of Acer. “The high level of engineering and design quality we set for the S7 was achieved by placing the user experience as our top design priority, and by our ongoing commitment to introducing technologies into our products that truly complement human behavior, and stimulate curious and progressive thought and action.”

November 12, 2012: Acer America’s New C7 Chromebook: Secure, Speedy and Simple

Editor’s Summary:

  • Available for purchase starting tomorrow in the U.S. through Google Play, Best Buy stores and BestBuy.com at an affordable $199
  • Provides hassle-free computing with automatic security and software updates
  • Great for use as an additional home computer
  • Includes built-in apps for productivity, collaboration and entertainment

Acer America today debuts its new Acer C7 Chromebook, its next-generation mobile computer that runs Google’s Chrome operating system and is priced at a low $199.

The new Acer C7 Chromebook is the ideal additional laptop for families, students and business people that need a fast, easy and secure way to get online to do their computing in the cloud, such as using Gmail, keeping up on social networks, shopping, and paying bills.

“Today’s computer users are doing more online heightening the need for enhanced security, quicker online access and an easy-to-use interface,” Jim Wong, corporate president, Acer Inc. “The Acer C7 Chromebook provides all this at an affordable price, making it the right choice for families and students on a budget as well as anyone who wants a new or second mobile PC for web-based computing.”

“The core of Google’s Chromebook vision is creating a better, more simple computing experience and making it available to everyone,” said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president, Chrome and Apps, Google. “We’re excited about the Acer C7 Chromebook, the newest addition to the Chromebook family. The Acer C7 delivers a hassle-free computing experience with the speed, security and simplicity that users expect of Chromebooks built in.”

December 10, 2012: Acer Appoints Tiffany Huang President of PC Global Operations – Incumbent president, Campbell Kan, to serve as special assistant to Acer chairman

Acer announces the appointment of Tiffany Huang to become the president of Personal Computer Global Operations (PCGO), reporting to the corporate president, Jim Wong. Huang shall replace Campbell Kan who will serve as special assistant to the chairman, J.T. Wang. Both appointments shall take effect from January 1, 2013.

Kan has held key positions within Acer’s IT products global operations over the past twelve years, and is accredited for his excellent management and contribution to the mobile PC business. With his extensive knowhow, Kan shall take charge of key projects assigned by Acer chairman where he can lend his expertise for the future of the company.
With her latest appointment, Huang leaves her post as associate vice president of Supply Chain Operations Business Unit after twelve years in this field. In the past year, she has also held positions in the Operations Analysis Office responsible for analyzing and strategizing corporate operations, and the Strategic Demand Planning Business Unit for demand and material planning.
During her career at Acer, Huang has demonstrated clear potential with her leadership quality, execution and communication skills, and experience in cross cultural and cross functions. Her sense of business acumen, global insight, matched by accurate end-to-end projections on many occasions deemed her to be the ideal candidate to take the position as president of PCGO, as Kan assumes his new post.
Huang joined Acer in 1988 in the legal division dealing with intellectual property rights. From 1997 to 2001 she served as director of operations management at Acer’s U.S. operations. In 2001 she returned to the Taipei headquarters and was later promoted to associate vice president of supply chain operations until the latest appointment.
Born in 1964, Huang has a Bachelor of Science degree in Law from Taiwan’s Chung-Hsing University.

January 7, 2013: Acer Extends AcerCloud to Top Three Operating Systems, Making it Easy to Share Files and Media among Windows, iOS and Android Devices

Acer today announced cross-platform support for AcerCloud, the company’s file sharing and media management solution, free to Acer customers. Consumers can now share, retrieve and enjoy their multimedia and data files using a variety of computing devices, regardless of which operating system they are running – Windows, Android or iOS.

AcerCloud uses the free space on a PC’s hard drive as cloud storage space.  Users simply designate one of their PCs as their “Cloud PC,” enabling them to use the available hard drive space on their own PC, giving them security and full control over their storage needs.  And unlike other cloud solutions, consumers won’t receive constant reminders about exceeding capacity with solicitations to pay for more storage.

“With AcerCloud, Acer now supports free file sharing between all of the key mobile devices, adding tremendous value to Acer customers,” said Acer President, Jim Wong.  “AcerCloud greatly simplifies our customers’ ability to manage all of their digital assets across all of their devices, regardless of platform.”

Acer, Asustek actively marketing cloud computing solutions [DIGITIMES, July 25, 2013]

Acer and Asustek have been pushing forward in marketing hardware/software-integrated cloud computing solutions focusing on educational applications and web storage, respectively, according to the companies.

Acer has integrated its servers with software used in eDC, its electronic information management center, into cloud computing solutions and promoted sales through cooperation of system integration providers, the company indicated. The cloud computing solutions are mainly used for educational purposes, with procurement by local governments being the major source of business, Acer noted. In addition to contracts from schools in Taiwan and Thailand, Acer has been marketing products in Nanjing City, eastern China, and Chongqing City, western China, and plans to tap the North America and Europe markets, Acer noted.

Asustek has its subsidiary, Asus Cloud, responsible for operating its cloud computing business. In addition to Taiwan-based Cathay Financial Holdings and Taishin Financial Holding, Asus Cloud-developed storage solutions have been adopted by the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) under the government-sponsored National Applied Research Laboratories, Asus Cloud CEO Peter Wu said. Asus Cloud will offer a storage solution of 1PB in total capacity for NCHC, with more than 10TB to come into use in the second half of 2013, Wu indicated. In addition, Asus Cloud has signed with the government of Chongqing City to develop cloud computing platforms for education, civic services and by small- to medium-size enterprises in the city, Wu said.

June 3, 2013: Acer Enhances its Flagship Ultrabook™, the Aspire S7

“We designed the S7 to be the best touch Ultrabook in the world, bar none,” said Jim Wong, Acer Corporate President. “We listened carefully to users to find substantial ways to make it even better.” The re-engineered S7 delivers improved battery life of up to 7 hours, a 33% increase from its predecessor. Its new light-sensing EL backlit keyboard is also refined, with a deeper keystroke for more natural and comfortable typing. Plus, thanks to 2nd generation Acer TwinAir cooling technology, the noise at maximum load is more than 20% lower than the previous S7, keeping the system quiet and cool. … The new Aspire S7 will be available in Q3 2013.

The end of the road announcements:

Acer Chairman and CEO J.T. Wang Tenders Resignation; Corporate President Jim Wong to Succeed as CEO – Wang to remain in chairmanship to fulfill tenure as Acer begins a comprehensive restructuring and transformation [press release, Nov 5, 2013]

Acer announces that the resignation of J.T. Wang, Chairman and CEO, has been approved by its board of directors. Wang shall remain in chairmanship until the end of his tenure next June. The Board and The Search Committee also agreed that Corporate President Jim Wong will succeed Wang as the new CEO from January 1, 2014. A comprehensive restructuring plan has been formulated by the Acer management team, and without delay, the Board will commence with its corporate transformation.
J.T. Wang, chairman and CEO of Acer, said, “Acer encountered many complicated and harsh challenges in the past few years. With the consecutive poor financial results, it is time for me to hand over the responsibility to a new leadership team to path the way for a new era.”
Acer’s board of directors stated, “We are very grateful for Wang’s contribution and hard work. The past two to three years have been extremely tough for Acer due to the rapidly changing industry and market conditions. We fully respect Wang’s decision to step down; however, in the interest of ensuring company stability and a smooth transition during this latest restructuring and transformation, we have asked J.T. to remain to complete his tenure as Chairman which ends in June 2014.”
Wang elaborated, “Together with the management team, we have crafted a far-reaching plan for Acer’s transformation. I wish to thank the board members for their support and to Jim for assuming the CEO duties. I feel optimistic toward Acer’s future. The management team promises to carry out the internal restructuring and will work closely with the Board on the corporate transformation.”
Acer’s Board has set up a Transformation Advisory Committee with board member [founder] Stan Shih as Chairman and Acer co-founder George Huang as executive secretary. The committee will propose changes in the company vision, strategy, and execution plans for the Board’s approval. They will work with the management team to carry out the transformation to increase shareholder value. To support new development needs, the Board has approved the issue of 136 million new common shares for a capital increase in cash (approximately 4.8% of total shares).
Stan Shih stated, “After I retired from Acer I shifted my attention to promoting public interests. But when J.T. tendered his resignation, the Board turned to me for help. In consideration of personal social responsibility and for Acer’s onward sustainability, I agreed to take on the duty to help the management team with a smooth handover during this transition period.”
Shih added, “After making structural adjustments, we will introduce more competitive products within the existing PC, tablet, and smartphone business and stabilize our market share. This will be the basis of our transformation and for developing new business opportunities.”
Acer’s personnel and business restructuring plans include reducing manpower, product plan termination with related product tooling and legal fees, resulting in a one-time cost of US$150M which is expected to be reported in the Q4’13 financial results. Acer will cut its worldwide employees by 7% resulting in OPEX savings of US$100M annually from 2014.

Acer Q3’13 Financial Results: Consolidated Revenue NT$92.15B (US$3.11B), Operating Loss NT$2.57B (US$86.61M), Intangible Asset Impairment NT$9.94B (US$335.13M), PAT NT$-13.12B (US$-442.19M), EPS NT$-4.82 [press release, Nov 5, 2013]

Acer’s financial results for Q3 2013, approved by its Board of Directors, are: Consolidated Revenue of NT$92.15B (US$3.11B), up 3.1% quarter-over-quarter and down 11.8% year-over-year; an Operating Loss of NT$2.57B (US$86.61M). In addition, due to a non-cash related intangible asset impairment of NT$9.94B (US$335.12M), profit after tax was NT$-13.12B (US$-442.19M), and earnings per share was NT$-4.82.
Q3’s operating loss was mainly due to the gross margin impact of gearing up for the Windows 8.1 sell in and the related management of inventory. In addition, in Q3, there were one time compensation payments related to the long standing eMachines consumers litigation. This is now settled.
The intangible asset impairment loss, which includes trademarks and goodwill, is NT$9.94B (US$335.13M).This impairment, which covers the Gateway, Packard Bell, Founder, iGware and ETen brands, is made in accordance with IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and is reflective of changes in business strategy. The impairment is a non-cash charge and has no impact on Acer’s business operation and working capital.
Acer’s consolidated revenue for the first three quarters is NT$273.50B (US$9.22B), down 16.6% year-over-year; operating losses for this period are NT$3.15B (US$106.3M). Due to the impact of the intangible asset impairment of NT$9.94B (US$335.13M), PAT is NT$-12.95B (US$-436.42M), and EPS is NT$-4.76. After the impairment of intangible assets, Acer’s net value per share is NT$23.1.
Looking at Q4, due to the adjustment on brand strategy, shipments for Acer’s notebooks, tablet PCs and Chromebooks are expected to decrease by 10% compared to Q3, however, the gross margin is expected to improve.
Notes:

  • The spot rate as of November 5, 2013 was used — US$1: NT$29.67.
  • Acer Inc. consolidated revenue includes revenues from other companies in which Acer Inc. has 50% or more ownership, and already deducts any revenues between Acer Inc. and these companies to avoid double-counting.

Intel’s new era of integrated computing: Look inside, looking ahead by Renee James, President

October 5, 2013 10:39 pm / Leave a comment

Intel App Show for Developers – IDF 2013 Day 1 Keynote Review [intelswnetwork YouTube channel, published on Oct 2, 2013]

Bob and Eric Mantion [Capt Geek] breakdown IDF13’s day one keynote and discuss why they believe this could be the best keynote in recent memory.
imageFrom: 2013 Intel Developer Forum Opening Keynote [transcript, Sept. 10, 2013] Brian Krzanich, CEO, and Renee James, President
Brian Krzanich: … to show just how far we’re looking ahead, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Intel’s newest president, Renee James. [The inserted images are from the presentation PDF]
Renee James: Good morning. For 45 years, Intel’s been inventing the future. For 45 years, we’ve been building the foundation of this industry, which is the silicon transistor, which you just saw. And for 45 years, we have been doing the things that everybody said can’t be done.

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Now, we’re going to lead the industry into a new era of computing, an era of computing where everything computes. And we’ll transition from worrying about the form factor, or the look and feel of the device, to the real problems that computing has solved for us — compute that’s integrated into the fabric of our daily lives, and assists us in solving problems, like managing huge global cities, or finding cures through personalized healthcare.
We’ll be able to solve ordinary problems in extraordinary ways, and extraordinary problems will be solved in seemingly ordinary ways. It will be from the mundane to the miraculous, when integrated computing is in our future.
For the rest of this talk, what I’m going to do is give you a glimpse of some of the projects that are started today using integrated computing to solve really tough problems that are out there, and give you a glimpse of what the world’s going to look like, from our point of view. But first, I’d like to take you back to the beginning, where all good stories start.
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Forty-five years ago, when Intel was founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Bob was the inventor of the silicon transition and integrated circuits, and he gave us a mandate, to go out and do something wonderful. Gordon gave us the compass for that mission with Moore’s Law, and since then Intel has been on the relentless pursuit of the essential underpinnings of this industry, improving the silicon transistor.
All of you know this, because some of you have written it. Moore’s Law has been declared dead at least once a decade since I’ve been at Intel, and as you know, you heard from Brian, we have 14 nanometers working, and we can see beyond that. I assume you, it’s alive and well, and we’re going to enable many, many things with it.
One of the things that Moore’s Law enables is the mobility that all of you are using to tweet and surf and text while I talk. We’re going to talk about that.
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All right, today we work in the nano-world, and for those of you that aren’t big aficionados of semiconductor technology, I thought I’d take a second and just explain to you what it really is like. We build transistors atom by atom. Not long ago, we actually didn’t imagine how we would build a transistor that was smaller than 22 nanometers, and now you’ve seen 14 working in Brian’s talk this morning. So, if you don’t know how small that is, consider this. A nanometer is to a yardstick — let me get my marble — as this marble is to the planet earth, that’s how small.
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And we build billions of those transistors on every chip, and hundreds of millions of those chips a year. At our scale, what we do is as complex as putting a man on the moon was in 1969, or putting a rover on Mars in the 21st century. What we do takes fundamental scientific breakthrough. Just to make a single new feature or a new product, something for example like HKMG [High-K Metal Gate] or a 3D transistor, both of which were research projects until Intel had fundamental breakthroughs that moved them into high production and scale.
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These are a few of the additional technological breakthroughs that people said they were barriers. You can’t overcome them, it can’t be done. And the fact is, we have, and we’ve done it so consistently that we make it look easy. Every time you turn on your phone, your tablet, your PC, it just works. It seems easy. And behind that are tens of thousands of people fundamentally making scientific breakthrough so that works.
These are the breakthroughs that fuel the entire industry, and they make the foundation of the compute platform that you as developers do your work on. And compute platforms and devices follow Moore’s Law as well, not just silicon transistors. They continue to evolve in power and features and performance, and it’s all based on that underlying progress that we make.
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So, I want to give you some examples — they’ll be super fun. So, here’s one. I know all of you are going to recognize this. This — right, the DynaTAC 8000, Motorola phone. In 1980, this phone was built using 1500-nanometer technology, which was state of the art, for 22 nanometers today, right? Some of you remember this was your first cellphone, and it was super cool — not so much today. Today it looks like a prop from a movie. Wasn’t very pocket friendly. Battery life measured in — anybody? — minutes, exactly.
Okay, here’s state of art today. This is an Intel-based phone, it’s a Lenovo K900. And this phone is state of the art. Twelve days in standby, 12 hours in talk time. So remember, until 1990, most phones were installed in cars permanently, because they needed a power source, right? And all you could do was make a voice call. Could you imagine buying a phone that could only do a voice call today? No one would buy that, right? Making a call is not the most extraordinary thing that this phone does.
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So, let’s talk about what’s extraordinary about it. It has more performance than Pentium® 4. It runs at two gigahertz, that phone, which 12 years ago was the fastest desktop computer you could buy. This is the fundamental advancement of what Intel does. It’s what Moore’s Law brings you, and it’s what we’ve done to make that phone’s performance seem totally mundane.
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We’ve driven three breakthroughs in computing. The first one was very much about task-based computing. And the next phase — the one that I think we’re living in today — I call is lifestyle computing. I’ll talk a little bit more about why. The next phase is very much about integrated computing.
I’ll start with task-based. Task-based computing really started with origins with the mainframe. It was very much about the scarce resource, and your important task, and what you had to get done. In fact, Intel’s first significant products were memory products for working in mainframes.
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The PC changed that. The PC democratized computing and allowed everybody to be able to do their own tasks. It was still very task-based. But, of course, the PC evolved. It evolved into the era that we’re in now, lifestyle computing. Lifestyle is very much about you, your data, wherever you want it, whenever you want it, to do what you need to get done.
I want to just pause there and think about evolutions in computing. They don’t come that often. When they do, at the beginning, we think it’s the next big thing. Everything that came before it, dead. But that’s not true. Right? It’s an evolution. Evolutions in computing don’t end. What happens is they continue forward, like the mainframe does today, and they evolve, and they adapt. You should think about each new phase in computing as not an ending but the beginning of the next frontier of where we’re going to go.
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So the next chapter. What happens in the next chapter of computing? We think that familiar objects that occur in your everyday life get new capabilities. So I’m going to give you a pretty mundane example — a car headlight. What has been the greatest breakthrough in the car headlight in the last decade? Not that much. But now we can add silicon-based sensors to them and make them smart so they can detect the rain. Okay. But I don’t need to detect the rain. I need to actually see individual raindrops so that they can shoot the headlight beams around them.
What it allows you to do is, of course, safer driving, better clarity at night. Ordinary or extraordinary? Mundane or miraculous? Safer driving. When silicon can be made small enough, smart enough to transform a headlight, it can transform every other area of our life.
Quark — which Brian just talked about — is our new family of products that are targeted at integrated computing. And I use that term to be inclusive of Internet of things, of wearables, of traditional embedded. All of these new areas, and some of the older areas in embedded technology, that are getting smarter, and they’re getting connected. All of them will be connected, all of it will compute.
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So let me show you a few examples of what’s happening today. The city of Dublin, Ireland — not the one in the East Bay — has a program that’s called City Watch and City Sensing. And what they’re doing is they put sensors into the street drainage system, which sounds pretty boring. But it allows them to monitor the flood warnings in the city of Dublin. And it alerts the crews to what’s happening.
But more importantly, it sends out some other information through their cloud servers. It sends out signals to the traffic system to divert [unintelligible] away from the high water area, and it also sends out a city map so that if you live in Dublin, Ireland, you can figure out what’s going on. And the citizens get to participate because, of course, there’s an app for that. There’s a City Watch app. And so they submit real time update reports. And they basically use all of that data together in a crowd sourcing way to put real time status as to what’s going on in the city of Dublin.
Most people don’t even know what’s happened. They don’t know that there’s sensors in their street. They don’t know that the traffic lights are timing or diverting them in different places, getting multiple sources of data real time, being put into a cloud service and sent out back to their smartphones.
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Why is this important? Because by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population are going to live in these megacities — Dublin not being one of the biggest ones, of course. And something as mundane as a clogged drain becomes more than an annoyance. It becomes a systemic problem that needs the ability to fix it quickly, to manage massive amounts of data, to alert a huge number of populations.
Imagine, as developers, for you, what this means. Whole new platforms that we haven’t even thought about as compute platforms. Brand new kinds of applications that can be built. And managing [mega]cities is just one of those examples.
The other really interesting example — and there are so many that we actually had to pare it down so we could get it into this time slot — is in healthcare. 70 percent of these people that I was talking about that are going to be living in big cities, they’re going to be aging — as am I. We have these questions that we keep asking. Are we going to have enough hospitals? Will we have enough clinics? Will we be able to train enough doctors with this aging population?
They need more than just hospitals and clinics and doctors. They need care that’s affordable and is easy to administer. And the era of integrated computing allows us to offer some new answers to those old questions.
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What if we’ve moved healthcare out of a hospital? [14:31]
[This – for some unknown reason – was left out of the published keynote at http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2013/sf/keynote/130910_rj/index.html 
So here is that video part starting at [0:32] of this report: Amazing New Wearable Devices demonstrated by Intel President Renée James at IDF 2013 [Santa Barbara Arts TV YouTube Partner Global News YouTube channel, Sept 10, 2013] covering eveything, except the dimmed two paragraphs in the end. 

] Brian talked about wearables, and you’ve seen kind of a glimpse of what’s coming. It’s going to be beyond jewelry and eyeglasses into devices like this one.

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Let me show you this. This is a wearable from Sotera Wireless, in trials right now. I will put it on. I’m going to see if my heart rate’s really high here. What it’s doing is it’s taking a constant reading and transmitting reports wirelessly to a service. This is actually a real time EKG, blood pressure, and other vitals, just from a wristband. It is pretty big and unattractive but what this replaces is an entire — on this table, on the end — bunch of equipment that you would have to have in a medical clinic, and it gives you real time results to the doctor.
Here is another example of innovation in medicine by MC10. Through the magic of what silicon and transistor technology, in the future, this patch — this prototype silicon-based patch – could take the wonderful innovation shown by Sotera and perhaps even do much of the same in an even smaller package. This will be directly on your skin. This patch will perform all of the same functions that that wearable does today. This is from a company called MC10, and it’s a prototype right now.
So why is this important? That little patch thing is like a Band-Aid. You just peel it off and stick it on. So why is it important?
Because it’s a constant data stream that your doctor can see, that if something’s wrong it’s immediate, it’s up-to-date and accurate. And it allows us to move into the most exciting phase of healthcare that I think is in this frontier for us, and that is moving into customized care.
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[14:31] Care that’s actually tailored to the things that are going on in your body. There are a tremendous number of other devices and other applications — injectables, ingestibles — that we’ve looked at. I didn’t have time for all of them today. But all based on a fundamental, foundational building block of this industry, which is the silicon transistor.
Customized care, with your own genomic data, is the pinnacle of healthcare. And we first mapped the human genome using an Intel high performance computer, a Xeon-based computer. That’s pretty exciting for us. And as you can imagine – as we like to talk about Big Data – there is one Big Data challenge.

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I’d like to share how big a Big Data problem. One person’s genomic map is a petabyte of data. That’s 1000 terabytes for one person, enough to fill 20 filing cabinets of information. And through the work that we do, the advancements in price performance, Moore’s Law, what we do every single day, we’ve transformed the ability to sequence. And what used to take years in 2000 is now down to two weeks, and we’re working to get that down to days and hours.

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But more importantly, a single sequence used to be $70 million. It’s now less than $5,000 to do one sequence, and we are on route to make that $1,000, which means personalized genomic sequencing is within our reach. And it’s moving faster than the rate of Moore’s Law.
But let’s think about the benefits of that. Why are we excited? Why am I excited about that? Why do we get up every day and say, you know what, working with Intel, working at Intel, it’s pretty excited because we get to change the world? Why?
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One-third of all women and half of all men are going to be diagnosed with cancer, right? Early detection and treatment is the way to solve cancer in most cases, and it’s customized to that individual, it makes the profoundest difference in its effectiveness. And that’s where we can make a difference.
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Using high-performance computers, the Knight Center for Cancer Research at the Oregon Health Sciences University is working on analyzing human genomic profiles and creating searchable DNA, customized DNA maps. And what I’d like to do is share directly from them with you what they’re doing. [17:15]
[Video plays.]
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[19:21] Renee James: As doctor Drucker said, in this next era, we’re moving the biology problem to a computational problem in the treatment of cancer.
Computing doesn’t get any more personal than when it saves your life, so I’d like to share another story with you. And it’s the story about an Intel employee, in fact, one of our fellows, who’s here with us at IDF. He fought a 24-year battle with cancer. When he was a young man in college, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer, and he was given a few years to live. And he went through dozens and dozens of debilitating cancer therapies, and he was very brave, and he defined all his doctors’ odds with his longevity, but in the end, the cancer never went away, and his kidneys did eventually fail.
Recently, in his work that he’s been doing, he was visiting a genomic company, and they asked if they could sequence his tumor. And he said yes. He allowed them to do it. And what they did is they shared that data with all of his doctors. I’m not going to tell you the end of this story. I would like you to help me welcome Intel fellow Eric Fishman to tell his story.

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Eric Dishman: Thank you. Alive and well. I think I’ve had more predictions of my death than maybe even Moore’s Law.
Renee James: [Moore’s Law, alive and well, ladies and gentlemen.]
Eric Dishman: [Unintelligible.]
Renee James: Why don’t you tell everybody what happened the day that you showed up to your doctors and they had your tumor sequence?
Eric Dishman: It was just miraculous. At that point, I was so sick, I was going to the doctor twice a week. So it was my Thursday appointment, and I walk in, and they’ve got some of my East Coast physicians on Skype and some doctors on the phone, and all my doctors are working together, and I’m like, uh oh. And then they basically tell me that 90 percent of the drugs that they’ve put me on were never going to work because this genomic map had revealed this to them. And they basically admitted that they had mischaracterized and sort of misunderstood my cancer for over two decades.
Renee James: And then what happened?
Eric Dishman: Well, at that point, then they had the good news, which was we think we understand enough about your cancer, and it’s really Eric’s cancer, it’s unique, like the [physician] said, we’re going to put you on this drug for completely different organs and see how it goes. Four months later, I walk into my diagnostics, the technicians, you know, looking in shock at the scans, they do them again, and they’re like you’re cancer free, you can start the whole kidney transplant process at this point in time.
Renee James: That is miraculous.  And I want you to share with us how now your work at Intel is about scaling that out, so that other people can have this experience.
Eric Dishman: That is exactly true, and scale is the thing. That’s one of the reasons I work at Intel. [I mean], probably less than 50,000 people on the planet have had access to the kind of whole genome sequencing that I’ve had, and that’s generated about 2.5 petabytes of data. If we had every cancer patient today having a whole genome sequence like once every two weeks, which is what they would ultimately want to do, we’d generate 500 exabytes of data, and that’s just in the U.S.
So as we think about this globally, how do we scale? So we’ve got our product teams in there working on the fabric, the storage, the compute, I mean, the whole system — how’s it possibly going to be done? On the policy side, we’re working on how do we deal with the privacy and the security and the ethical issues of sort of scaling this?
On the R&D side, it’s everything like you showed, from biochips to Big Data and solving breakthroughs there. And then, finally, on the sort of human and sort of education side, we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to create a genome-ready workforce, train a million doctors on how to incorporate this data and move forward on getting biologists to understand programming and programmers to understand biology.
Renee James: Wow. Thank you for sharing your very personal story with the audience, and congratulations on being cancer free.
Eric Dishman: Thank you.
Renee James: Thank you. So 20 years of ineffective therapies at an expense and certainly the worry of what Eric went through, all of that changed by the benefits of personalized medicine and cost-effective integrated computing. Affordable genomics,  cities that reroute traffic and alert you to problems — a few years ago, a lot of what I talked about seemed like science fiction, and today, you can see it’s in our near future.
It’s the future before us when computing becomes truly integrated into our lives. For 45 years, Intel has done the things that everybody said couldn’t be done, and we’ve invented the future time and time again. I’d like to close by saying, in the words of Intel founder Bob Noyce, I’d like to invite all of you to not be encumbered by history and to go off and do something wonderful. Thank you.

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[End of presentation.]

IDF13 Day 1 Keynote Highlights & Takeaways [by CaptGeek [Eric Mantion] (Intel) on Intel® Developer Zone, Sept 10, 2013]

So, this is not my first rodeo (as the saying goes) – in fact, I’ve been going to IDF, on and off, for over 10 years, starting with my time when I was a semiconductor analyst. And, yes, I now work for Intel, so some may feel my opinion is biased, but, regardless, here it is anyway:
     This morning was the best IDF Keynote I’ve ever seen
What made this morning better? If I had to summarize it, I’d say it breaks down into 3 things: Intimacy, Lifestyle, and Leadership. Let me explain…
Intimacy
The very first thing I noticed this morning was, before Brian Krzanich said his first word was how he was dressed. Not only did he not wear a tie, but he didn’t even wear a jacket. The tone was very casual, but not in a lazy way. When he spoke, on stage, he went right out to he front of it, basically as far out to the audience as he could, as if he wanted to say “I am one of you – I’m a Geek & I’m proud of it.” Now, someone will say that a slight shift to a dress code & positioning on stage doesn’t much matter, but I would completely disagree because, before joining Intel in 2005, I knew well the biggest criticisms of Intel. In one word, it would have been Arrogance. In three words, it would have been “Intel Doesn’t Listen.” Now, I think that is changing, which I think is a great thing. But it wasn’t just the lack of a jacking and where he stood – the subtleties continued when our new President, Renée James did her keynote. Not once did she hold up a wafer. Not once did she say the word Gigahertz. But, what she did talk about was how Intel was making life better. During Brian’s portion, he talked about the   Intel Quark SoC, which is planned to be 1/5th the size of Intel Atom processors and 1/10th the power consumption. But when Renée spoke, she addressed the why wearables mattered. A great example was what I called a “Hospital-in-a-Patch” that didn’t look much different thank an anti-smoking patch, but would be able to monitor several of your medical vitals no matter where you were. While still in development, it shows the amazing promise of the not-too-distant-future. But she didn’t just pontificate, she brought out an Intel Fellow, Eric Dishman who told a very personal story. Arguably, it was the most personal story a person could tell because it was not only about his own 24-year battle with Cancer, but also how mapping his genome has led his doctors to a path that, thankfully, gave them the opportunity to tell him the magical words: “Eric, you’re cancer free.” I don’t know how you can get more personal, more intimate that that in a story. But it didn’t stop there. Then Renée was finished, Brian re-joined her on stage for the first-ever, “open Q&A with the CEO and the President of Intel.” This has never been done in the history of IDF, but I loved that it did. To me, it signaled change. To me, it was a message: “Yes, we know we make amazing silicon, but none of it means anything if we don’t have get hardware partners to put them into products and great software partners that make the magic happen. In short, Intel is nothing without our partners, so we want you to know that we care, deeply, about you. We want to have a closer, more intimate relationship with you and do amazing, wonderful things together…
Lifestyle
What is the difference between Ordinary and Extraordinary. Renée said it best: Intelligence. What happens when everything gets smarter? The simple answer is life gets better. Whether it is critical technology like the Hospital-in-a-Patch mentioned above or just convenient technology, as things get smarter, life gets better. For example, what if every parking meter was smarter? What if, before you leave your car, you put your smart phone next to the NFC sensor on the parking meter to register your phone. Then, if your meal is running long, it sends you a quick message of “your meter is running low, would you like to refill it?” and, with a simple press of the button, you can. How great would that be? When I was trying to explain the implications today at lunch, I used the table we were eating at as an example. What if, when you sat down, your table was your menu? Instead of the wait staff having to go back and forth, asking if you were ready to order, as soon as you were, you ordered. Also, the moment the kitchen runs out of “Catfish” then all the menus are automatically updated so that option would be grayed out. Also, as soon as you were ready to pay your bill, you could, right on the table, with the NFC on your phone. Or, if you wanted some help, you could just push a button like you do on an airplane & your server could come right out. But this doesn’t just help customers, it would help the restaurateurs as well. If you could save 10 minutes for every customer, a eating establish might be able to fit an entirely extra sitting in the course of a dining cycle. For the fixed costs of the chief & kitchen staff, that could be the difference between being profitable and closing your doors. But these types of “Lifestyle Computing” – or integrated computing, depending on how you looked at it – wasn’t just about tiny, minuscule computers, but also on the other end, the Big Data server rooms. For example, you want better healthcare, then your doctors need to get to know you better, and far better than you can do from just a form. They need to map your Genome, which, if your curious, is about a Petabyte of Data. For those not so familiar with these prefixes, that is around a thousand Terabytes or around a million Gigabytes. So, take that smart phone with 1GB of memory & put it in a pile with a million other phones – that’s the data required to map EVERY person’s genome. Multiple that by the 1/3 of all women and 1/2 of all men that will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime and you get to the legal definition of a “butt-load of data.” But, never fear, the new i5 Xeon processors being launched this week are up to that task. So, your lifestyle computing – whether it is wearables devices or warehouse of servers, Intel has got you covered. And that brings us to our last category…
Leadership
It was subtle, but our new CEO – affectionately called “BK” in the halls of Intel – put all Intel employees on notice:
  • If it computers, we will lead
To me, that is vision. That is leadership. There was no squishy areas there, no caveats, no outs. It was simple, straight-forward, and to the point. If it computes, than Intel will do its best so serve that market segment as well as we can. Oh, and, if you missed it, in the future, everything will compute. Your grandpa’s favorite recliner won’t just recline, but rather it will watch him. It will monitor his vitals it will check to see if he’s been siting there past when he was supposed to take his medication and alert him if it needs to. And, heaven forbid, he should have a heart attack while sitting there in an empty house, he will be helped, immediately, even faster than if you were in the next room. In essence, in the future, no seasoned citizen will ever be sitting in an empty house again, but houses, furniture, kitchens, everything will be smarter and connected. Making your life, my life, and most importantly, the lives of the people we love, not only better, but, ideally, longer – as long as possible. Roughly a century ago, we were went through an important transformation – an electrical one. Instead of candles, we gained electric lights. Instead of washboards, we gained washing machines. Instead of a hand pump in your kitchen, we gained running water. Now we are on the cusp of the next transformation: Intelligence. Instead of an electric light, we’ll get a smart one – that turns itself off when not needed (like when no one is in the room) and turns itself on when needed. Instead of washing machines, we’ll get smart ones that analyses the soiling of your clothes and put in the right combination of detergent chemicals to optimize the cleaning. Instead of running water, we’ll gain smart faucets that automatically detects if the water coming out has a higher than allowable amount of harmful chemicals. It doesn’t matter what you pick – a bed, a pool, and gym, with greater intelligence comes a better life, just as electricity has been improving life for the last century or more. General Electrics’ age old tag line has been “We bring good things to life.” Perhaps Intel should adopt: “We bring better things to life,” because, as we lead in everything that computes, from wearables to phones to tablets to 2in1s and Ultrabooks to desktop PCs, and, of course, servers, life will get better, for everyone. And I, as one particularly proud Intel employee, doesn’t mind saying, that is a future that feels wonderful. Which, as it happens, was one of the pieces of closing advice from this morning’s keynote – a quote from one of our founders, Robert Noyce:

Q&A: Intel president Renee James on wearables [CITEworld, Sept 11, 2013]

After calculators, PCs and mobile phones, Intel is now jumping into wearable devices with an extremely low-power chip called Quark, which was big news at the company’s annual Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Leading the charge into the new market is Intel’s new leadership team consisting of CEO Brian Krzanich and President Renee James, who also articulated on plans to achieve fast growth in the mobile market while trying to reinvigorate PC sales.
It’s been an especially busy few months for James, who became Intel’s president on May 2 after running the company’s software unit as executive vice president and general manager of the software and services group. She is laying the groundwork for Quark chips to succeed in areas such as eye wear, personalized medicine and cloud services. In an interview with the IDG News Service, she talked about the wearable market, Quark and partner relationships.
IDGNS: Where do you see the wearable market going?
James: I think it’s way beyond wearables, I think it’s about integrated computing. I don’t think we know the boundaries of that. The silicon patch — the thought of just ripping something off like a band-aid, putting it on your arm, your doctor being able to know what your vitals are at that moment, that sounds like science fiction, but it’s real. That’s where we are at. That’s today’s outer boundary of where we are going with computing.
IDGNS: When do you see integrated computing becoming a practical market for Intel?
James: For Intel it is a practical market right now, we have different products and platforms that are being developed. That is why we introduced Quark. We believe in the things that you saw — they are not three, five or 10 years out, they are in the next 12 to 18 months.
IDGNS: Will you sell wearables directly to consumers? Intel is already planning to launch a TV service.
James: We tend to believe that our business model is best helping other people build things. It’s in these really highly integrated designs, you need to build one to know that everything is working systemically. We tend to build reference platforms, and we’re going to stick with that.

Insert of mine: nScreen Noise: Intel Media, UK kids love tablets 10/4/13 [Colin Dixon YouTube, Oct 3, 2013]

Lots of bad news for Intel Media’s OnCue virtual pay-TV operator service. Will it every launch? OfCom in UK says kids love tablets. Same in the US?
IDGNS: Quark is really low-power, but will it replace the Atom platform?
James: No. It’s the low Atom. You should think of Core, Atom, Quark. I love the Quark name, it’s so nerdy and funny. Quark is intended to look below Atom. It’s 10 times more power efficient, and it’s five times smaller. Atom is teeny, Quark is the smallest thing we’ve ever built.
IDGNS: Intel and low-power still raise a question mark today. How will Intel achieve low-power on Quark?
James: No, no, Intel and low power are not a question mark. We have lots of low-power products. It’s not a question at all. Maybe that was five years ago. If you look… at Haswell 22-nanometer, that product is a four-watt product with Core i5 performance and Core i5-level graphics in fanless [devices]. That’s the most [power-efficient] product ever built, anywhere.
IDGNS: Are you offering licensing or customizing Quark chips for third parties?
James: What we are offering is the ability to connect their intellectual property around ours. We also are offering fully designed products as well. It’s a broad range that we’re going to offer to customers in this category.
IDGNS: Intel is looking beyond Windows and moving to Android and Chrome for tablets and PCs. How is your relationship with Microsoft?
James: Our relationship with Microsoft is as good as ever. They are going to participate in IDF and you will hear from them about what’s going on with Windows 8.1. I think it’s just a matter of balance. Microsoft is not the only client operating system anymore. The same way for years and years Microsoft balanced between Intel and AMD, we’re in the same situation now. Our customers want choice, and we offer choice.
IDGNS: What’s the next big thing for Intel?
James: Integrated computing is the next big thing, I think it is the future of what we are going to do. It’s not going to be necessarily about this device or that device, it’s going to be about what problems we solve through computation. The final barriers, the things we don’t understand, and what does it mean to have a mesh network of connected devices with cloud services and how does it change what we think about. That’s the final frontier.
IDGNS: How important is your software background in leading a company that is traditionally focused on chips?
James: It’s actually more useful than people would imagine. It’s very relevant to the level of integrated platforms that we see people starting to build, even the way PCs are built now, servers, different workloads, what happens in the cloud. More so than ever on a forward-looking basis, the way computing is developing is going to be about the application, the workload, the right kind of compute for the right kind of task. The other thing is building system-on-chips and products today is very software oriented.
IDGNS: What is Intel’s direction in chip development?
James: The direction for us is to continue with “tick-tock” for the microarchitecture, but to consider how to do derivatives… using the system-on-chip methodology.

Intel President Renee James: Interview with the Wall Street Journal [Intel® Developer Zone, Aug 28, 2013] i.e. Intel’s own report 2 weeks later

Intel President Renee James recently sat down for a video interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler. In this interview, Ms. James discussed a wide range of issues around Intel’s computing strategy, anything from mobile to what’s coming up at IDF in September. You can watch the entire video below:
Intel’s New President Outlines Company’s Plans
[WSJDigitalNetwork YouTube channel, Aug 14, 2013]
Renee James sits down for a Big Interview with Rolfe Winkler. Photo: Getty Images.
On mobile:
Ms. James has been with Intel for 26 years, and worked closely with former Intel CEO Andrew Grove. She recently was named Intel President, and directs company-wide strategy with CEO Brian Krzanich. She noted that Intel wants people to know that “we love computing”, and aim to serve every segment, not just PCs.
Intel’s new focus is on mobile, especially on the Atom power line for ultramobility. There will be increased efforts on Android, with an equalization of efforts between Windows and Android. Everyone currently in this market space has advantages, and Intel’s is design and integrated manufacturing, the combination of process technology, and communications. It’s the integration that counts; the combination of all these elements that makes Intel the winner in the market.
In many ways Intel has led the exploration into mobility. James noted that “sometimes you don’t always know about the next thing being a disruption….it wasn’t the form factor, it was how people using computing changed – touch, voice, app models, all of that shifted. That combination with the new form factor really changed the way we look at computing.”
On IDF:
Intel’s premier developer conference is coming up September 10-12. There will be a lot of new things to see and talk about there as far as mobility, where Intel believes computing is heading, and future predictions on computer/human interactions.
On Atom:
Atom is a smaller, less expensive chip. James noted that the Intel point of view with this chip was that you didn’t need all the features and performance you need in more expensive chips since Atom is primarliy for phones, but now as mobile devices are becoming more important and prevalent, it’s also taken on more importance. Intel is building parts of Atom that come all the way up to the Core family with greater compatibility. All new Atom products run Windows.
On transparent computing:
People want their apps to perform no matter what platform they might be using. This aligns with the “Internet of Things” mentality; consumers want lower cost devices, but are also looking for compatiability with the rest of the software ecosystem.
On the shift to a more mobile computing ecosystem:
Mr. Winkler posed an interesting question: “As PCs are increasingly replaced by mobile devices, how do you navigate that transition?” Ms. James answered that Intel does not believe that PCs will ever be replaced, rather, different form factors will continue to emerge with the performance of the core product line in mobile devices. There are also different modes of usability in form factors such as the tablet, PC, 2 in 1’s, etc. It’s not a “one for one” replacement; James noted that these form factors are refreshing the market.
On form factors:
James noted there is a segmentation of tablets – the ones on the higher price point side generally offer more performance, and the ones on the lower price point side offer less. Intel has created Atom products that scale all the way up and down this ladder, with Haswell core-based products as well. These form factors overlap with price points, and some cannibalization is expected, but Intel is looking to create devices at every price point for more customer availability, opportunities, and innovation.
On Moore’s Law
When asked if Intel sees a finite ceiling as to how small chips can be produced, Ms. James replied that “we don’t see that”. There is more performance in a lower power envelope, and Intel has moved ahead multiple generations, becoming much more competitive in the mobile landscape.
How small can the chips actually get? James replied that Intel has “line of sight” for a couple more generations, but after that the future is unclear.
Data center
The data center arm of Intel is an important business, currently holding a 90% market share and bringing in substantial profits for Intel. Mr. Winkler asked about avoiding server upsets, and Ms. James noted that there is a market shift with new competitors, and the way you react initially is how the dynamic is going to go. She mentioned that “it’s good for Intel to have competitors” because it makes the company as a whole better. Intel is not waiting for the industry to change, and has already announced SOC server products based on the Atom family.
On Intel television
What does Intel plan to bring in the television space? James replied that just like everything else, television has gone digital. It’s delivered over an IP network, which is an opportunity for data to be broadcast to devices. Intel can bring tech integration and leadership to this area, making it more cost effective. It’s also a new market opportunity and area of growth.
Exciting times for Intel
This interview with Ms. James was extremely informative, and gave a great overview of where Intel is headed. Be sure to register for IDF 2013 and hear more from Intel leadership on the future of the company.

Which was reported by The Wall Street Journal as Intel Chips Away at Mobile, Wearable Computing [The CIO Report – WSJ, Aug 14, 2013] in the following way

As consumers shift spending to smartphones and tablets from PCs, mobile processors made by rivals have chipped away at Intel Corp.’s sales and profits. Intel in July reported $2 billion in profit for the second quarter, a drop of 29% from a year earlier, on sales of $12.8 billion, down 5% for the same period. The chipmaker, which once milked its Intel Inside brand, can no longer rely as much on PC chips as its cash cow. While PC sales decline, rivals building low-cost, low-power chips based onARM Holdings plc. designs dominate the mobile chip market.
Intel President Renee J. James admitted in an interview, Wednesday, that chips, as well as software for smartphones, tablets and embedded systems, are “markets that we need to go win.” Ms. James, who assumed her role in May after 25 years in various management roles at Intel, is particularly keen on Bay Trail, energy efficient chips she said will appear in tablets and convertible PCs this holiday season. Intel will unveil some of these products – and possible show off a wearable computer – at its developer forum next month. This is an edited transcript of a Q&A conducted with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors.
As you push harder into mobile, you also have to keep a strong hold on the PC. What is your strategy there?
We don’t see the PC going away overnight, but we do see a blending across the bottom end of [PC chips] and the high-end of the Bay Trail chips. You have to recreate the segmentation because [PCs and tablets] are overlapping now [with the proliferation of two-in-one, or convertible computers]. And 7-inch tablets and below are very much like phones and we have an objective in that market as well. By blending and having a shared goal for total compute, you start to think creatively about managing the transition. The suppliers and customers are the same.
How do you steal market share from ARM?
We believe we have better products, but we know we have better process technology. It will take us some time to get to the lowest end, but we have every intention of having products at every price point.
What was gist of the presentation you and new CEO Brian Krzanich gave to the board of directors on how to point Intel in the right direction?
We talked about getting back into the role of technology leader and really making sure that we’re leading into the next generation of where computing gets used. There’s a tremendous explosion in embedded computing, and the way people are thinking about computing, and we hear a lot about wearables, and there’s experimentation and new products like Google’s Glass. Our strategy is to win in every segment of computing and grow our share in overall compute. If it computes, we want to be in that market.
Do you have any wearable computers now?
None that are announced, but you should come to our developer conference in September. We’re going to be talking about where we see computing is going, where Intel is going, and a lot more about how we think computing will be used in the future, beyond the form factors you see today.
What are you doing to advance the Internet of Things?
We bought embedded software leader Wind River Systems, so we’ve done a lot of work creating combined product lines between Wind River and our embedded systems group. We’ve focused our work on specific vertical segments, such as in-vehicle entertainment, retail, point of sale and digital signage and infrastructure projects.
What about Internet of Things in the home?
We have not done as much in the home. I’m sure the team is working on things I don’t know about but… it’s a big opportunity.

Alibaba to secure “centuries” of the future of an already “US$150 billion ecosystem of consumers, merchants and business partners” via an internal partnership (rejuvenated each year) of top executive owners (with just 10% of shares) also controlling the board

October 3, 2013 3:39 pm / Leave a comment

With Michael Dell acquiring the rest 84% stake in Dell for $2.15B in cash, before becoming the next IBM, and even getting the cash back after the transaction [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Feb 8, 2013] on Sept 12, 2013 approved by Dell stockholders (for $13.88 per share in cash against the originally proposed $13.65) we had a clear evidence that in these turbulent and extremely fast changing market and business conditions the traditional way of corporate governance is becoming a significant strategic obstacle. Here we have an even more glaring example. Especially because of  The value of Taobao.com and TMall.com in China, as well as outside [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Sept 2, 2013] and the role those key assets of the Alibaba Group are playing for The Upcoming Mobile Internet Superpower [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Aug 13, 2013].

Alibaba slams HK exchange after IPO talks fail [South China Morning Post, Sept 30, 2013]

A senior Alibaba executive sharply criticized the Hong Kong stock exchange for not allowing the Chinese e-commerce giant to go public with its unique management structure, forcing it to shift efforts to the U.S for the potentially mammoth listing.

The company dropped plans this week to hold an IPO in the southern Chinese financial center because the stock market wasn’t willing to make an exception to its listing rules. Instead, it’s looking to New York for an initial public offering that analysts estimate could value the company at more than $100 billion.

That would dwarf the tech world’s other hotly anticipated share offering by Twitter, which is estimated to have a market value of $10 billion.
In a column posted late Thursday on Alibaba’s blog, Vice Chairman Joe Tsai said “Hong Kong must consider what is needed in order to adapt to future trends and changes.”
Tsai said the company had ended its discussions for a potential listing. It’s the first public acknowledgement that it has dropped its plans for an IPO in Hong Kong, which Tsai said was the company’s “first choice” because most of its business is in China.
Hangzhou, China-based Alibaba failed to persuade the Hong Kong stock exchange to grant it an exception from listing rules to allow it to maintain a “partnership” structure in which top executives, who own 10 percent of the company, retain control of the board.
Chairman Jack Ma has described the partnership system, which currently includes 28 people, as essential to preserving the company’s innovative culture.
Ma, a former English teacher, founded Alibaba in 1999 as a platform linking Chinese suppliers with retailers abroad. It has expanded in consumer e-commerce with its Taobao and Tmall platforms, which are among the world’s busiest online outlets.
China has the world’s biggest population of Internet users, and while it trails the U.S. and Japan in total e-commerce spending, the Boston Consulting Group forecasts it will rise to No. 1 by 2015.
Alibaba’s proposal failed because it was at odds with the Hong Kong exchange’s principle of treating all shareholders equally.
Tsai challenged the exchange over its rigidity.
“The question Hong Kong must address is whether it is ready to look forward as the rest of the world passes it by,” he said.
Alibaba’s two biggest shareholders, Yahoo and Japan’s Softbank, issued statements backing Alibaba.
“In a fast-moving technology market, it’s critical that a company’s leadership can continue to preserve its culture and set its strategic course for the future,” said Jacqueline Reses, chief development officer at Yahoo, which owns a 23 percent stake. She added that the U.S. Internet company believes Alibaba’s system reflects “the desire to govern the company for long-term success while also balancing the rights of shareholders.”
Masa Son, founder of Softbank Corp., which owns 35 percent, said he was “supportive” of the company’s structure.
Alibaba has not yet chosen an exchange or set a timetable for a U.S. listing. But it has hired U.S. law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett to help advise on the IPO and plans to hire underwriters soon, said a source familiar with the matter who was not allowed to speak publicly.
Goldman Sachs has estimated that a share sale could value Alibaba at as much as $105 billion.
Alibaba’s profit in the first three months of the year tripled to $669 million on revenue that rose 71 percent to $1.4 billion, according to Yahoo’s latest quarterly earnings.

Impact of Alibaba s IPO decision [CNN via VBG NewsTV YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

Alibaba Offers an Alternative View of Good Corporate Governance [Joe Tsai on Alizila blog, Sept 26, 2013]

Until recently, Alibaba was in dialogue with Hong Kong capital markets regulators on how to translate our guiding philosophy into a form of corporate governance in connection with a potential listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.  As a company with most of our business in China, it was natural for Hong Kong to be our first choice.
We proposed a governance structure that would enable Alibaba’s partners – key people who manage our businesses – to set the company’s strategic course without being influenced by the fluctuating attitudes of the capital markets so as to protect the long-term interests of our customers, company and all shareholders.
It has been said that Alibaba threatens the “one-share-one-vote” principle. Nothing is further from the truth.  We never made any proposal that involved a dual-class shareholding structure. A typical dual-class structure allows those who hold high-vote shares to out-vote the rest of shareholders on all corporate matters.  Our governance structure preserves significant rights of shareholders, including the unfettered rights to elect independent directors as well as rights to vote on substantial transactions and related party transactions.
Why do we insist on our governance structure?  Our overarching objective is to maintain the Alibaba culture. For the past 14 years, Alibaba operated with the ethos of helping the “small guy” to succeed, as embodied in our mission: “to make it easy to do business anywhere”.  This clear sense of mission, long-term focus and commitment to values defines the “Alibaba culture” and it is what makes us successful.
At the same time, we have also noticed that many great companies quickly deteriorate after their founders leave; in the same vein, a number of successful founders have also made fatal mistakes. The final governance structure we have selected is to replace founders with partners. The reason is simple – a group of partners who cherish the same culture and ideals is more likely to carry forward our principles and make good decisions for all stakeholders with a long-term view.  And in the decade to come, those partners will be guided by these principles when grappling with inevitable disruption and competition.
We believe this partnership system is the right way to build a sustainable business: partners are peers and, without bureaucracy or rigid hierarchy, they solve problems through collaboration.  Partners are not just managers but they are owners of the business with a keen sense of responsibility.  The partnership is rejuvenated each year through admission of new partners and, as such, it provides both continuity and longevity because it is a living body. With this system, we believe we can sustain the flame of innovation and constantly improve the talent pool of people who run the Alibaba business.
Those who lack appreciation of our partnership philosophy may view our proposal merely as a founder wanting to preserve control. We could not have a more different objective. Over the past 14 years, we have never sought to control this company through the shareholding structure and we will not begin to do so now. What we want to establish is a mechanism to safeguard the Alibaba culture and we hope that the company’s future is sustainable beyond the life of any one founder. (In fact, Alibaba did not have one or two founders, but 18 founders.  In a sense, we have operated as a partnership from Day One.)  Our hope is to achieve a mechanism for safeguarding the development of the company “to last 102 years,” i.e. spanning at least three centuries starting from 1999, the year we were founded.
imageAs the largest e-commerce marketplace operator in the world and a custodian of a US$150 billion ecosystem of consumers, merchants and business partners, our commitment to openness, transparency, sharing and responsibility is at the core of our value system.
We fervently believe maintaining an innovative culture and company mission are the essence of success in this disruptive world we operate in.  Our governance structure is a creative way to address the core issues that matter to shareholders while staying true to who we are – which we cannot, and will not, change.
As an e-commerce company, we are deeply aware of the disruption that is brought about by the Internet across all industries, and the capital markets are not exempt from this disruption. As a social enterprise, we will strive to drive and promote this type of innovation. We welcome a debate about models of good governance for a business like ours in the 21st century.
We understand Hong Kong may not want to change its tradition for one company, but we firmly believe that Hong Kong must consider what is needed in order to adapt to future trends and changes. The question Hong Kong must address is whether it is ready to look forward as the rest of the world passes it by.
Joe Tsai is a co-founder and Executive Vice Chairman of Alibaba Group

Background from the point of view of philosophies behind stock exchange regulations:
Breakingviews: Hong Kong’s Alibaba loss is New York’s gain? [Reuters TV YouTube channel, Sept 26, 2013]

Chinese Internet giant Alibaba has chosen New York over Hong Kong for its $15 billion IPO. Breakingviews’ Peter Thal Larsen and Rob Cox debate the pros and cons for the company and the exchanges.

Background on the stakes in question:
– How e-commerce is changing China [CNN via TheBreakingNewss YouTube channel, Sept 30, 2013]

The gentleman on the left is David Wei (Vision Night Capital) who was CEO of Alibaba since 2006 till his resignation in February 11, 2011. See: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/22/why-alibabas-ceo-had-to-go/

– How Alibaba unlocked the door to online shopping in China [Reuters TV YouTube channel, Oct 1, 2013]

Nearly a decade ago Alibaba Group launched Alipay — China’s answer to online payment giant PayPal. Today it’s seen as the magic password at the gate of China’s online commerce treasure trove.

Note that Alipay was “the largest online platform in the world in terms of registered users, transactions and total payment volume” back in 2011 according to Forbes. The above video shows that now it has a dominant position in China (which is also the largest e-commerce market in the world this year):

Background about the Alibaba Group and Alipay relationship (in order to see that the closing statement in the above video of not getting any benefit from Alipay is not true for the would be new shareholders of Alibaba):

Alibaba Group, Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO), and SoftBank (TYO:JP:9984) today announced they have reached an agreement in which Alibaba Group will continue to participate in Alipay’s future financial performance, including a future IPO or other liquidity event. The agreement is consistent with the two agreed-upon principles established at the outset of the negotiations: structure the inter-company relationship between Alipay and Taobao in order to preserve the value within Taobao and, by extension, within Alibaba Group; and provide that Alibaba Group is appropriately compensated for the value of Alipay.
Key Terms of the Agreement:
The agreement establishes the following:
  • The agreement preserves the existing relationship between Taobao and Alipay. Alipay will continue to provide payment processing services to Alibaba Group and its subsidiaries (including Taobao) on preferential terms.
  • Alibaba Group will license to Alipay certain intellectual property and technology and provide certain software technology services to Alipay and its subsidiaries. Alipay will pay to Alibaba Group, prior to a liquidity event, a royalty and software technology services fee, which consists of an expense reimbursement and a 49.9% share of the consolidated pre-tax income of Alipay and its subsidiaries.
  • Alibaba Group will receive no less than $2 billion and no more than $6 billion in proceeds from an IPO of Alipay or other liquidity event. The exact proceeds to Alibaba Group will be determined by multiplying the total equity value of Alipay by 37.5%, subject to the foregoing floor and ceiling amounts.
“Over the last few months, we have worked cooperatively with our partners at Yahoo! and SoftBank to reach an agreement that serves the interests of all parties,” said Jack Ma, Alibaba Group Chairman and CEO. “This agreement is good for Alibaba Group and its stakeholders, including customers, employees and shareholders. Most importantly, Alipay was able to secure the license it needed to continue operating.”
“This is a good outcome for Yahoo! and for our shareholders, as well as all the parties to this agreement,” said Carol Bartz, Yahoo! CEO. “As a result of this constructive process, we have an agreement that preserves the value of Taobao, provides for profit sharing at Alipay, and creates a structure to allow Alibaba Group to participate if Alipay’s value is realized in an IPO or other liquidity event. Alibaba Group and its management team have an impressive track record of value creation and we look forward to participating in Alibaba Group’s—and Alipay’s—continued success.”
“This agreement was in part made possible by the strong long-term relationship and trust that exists between the principals at Alibaba Group, SoftBank and Yahoo!, and also lays the foundation for Alibaba Group to continue its impressive growth under the dynamic leadership of Jack Ma,” said Masayoshi Son, SoftBank CEO. “Alibaba Group is a clear leader in the China Internet business, the largest and fastest growing market in the world, and the close relationship with Alipay will allow Alibaba Group to strengthen that leadership position in the years to come.”
Alipay provides payment processing services to Alibaba Group and some affiliates, including Taobao, and to third parties. Taobao is China’s largest online retail website. Alibaba Group’s principal shareholders include Yahoo!, SoftBank, and Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai. In May 2011, Alipay obtained a license to operate in China from the People’s Bank of China following the restructuring of Alipay. The license will enable Alipay to continue serving Taobao and its other customers in China.
Alibaba Group management has taken actions to comply with Chinese law governing payment companies in order to secure a license to continue operating Alipay. The Alibaba Group board discussed at numerous board meetings over the past three years the impending imposition of new regulatory requirements on the online payment industry, including ownership structures, as they were being developed in China, and was told in a July 2009 board meeting that majority shareholding in Alipay had been transferred into Chinese ownership. The actions taken by Alibaba Group management to comply with the licensing regulations and to ensure continuation of operations are in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. The continued operation of Alipay is essential to the preservation and enhancement of the value of Alibaba Group’s businesses such as Taobao, as Alipay is the payments platform for e-commerce in these businesses.
Kendall Law Group, a national securities firm led by a former federal judge with attorneys that include a former U.S. Attorney, announces a lawsuit filed on behalf of shareholders against Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) for alleged violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 concerning false and misleading statements regarding Yahoo’s business prospects.
A class action lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court, Northern District of California on June 6, 2011. Yahoo shareholders who purchased stock between April 19, 2011 and May 13, 2011 are urged to contact the Kendall Law Group for more information at 877-744-3728 or by email at skendall@kendalllawgroup.com. Any shareholder who purchased YHOO stock during this time period may move the Court to serve as a plaintiff in this class action. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court for appointment by August 5, 2011. A lead plaintiff is a class member who acts on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision to serve as a lead plaintiff.

From: Yahoo! Inc. Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q [May 10, 2011]

To expedite obtaining an essential regulatory license, the ownership of Alibaba Group’s online payment business, Alipay, was restructured so that 100 percent of its outstanding shares are held by a Chinese domestic company which is majority owned by Alibaba Group’s chief executive officer. Alibaba Group’s management and its principal shareholders, Yahoo! and Softbank Corporation, are engaged in ongoing discussions regarding the terms of the restructuring and the appropriate commercial arrangements related to the online payment business.

Regarding which in Yahoo Discloses Jack Ma Takes Control Of Alipay From Alibaba [Forbes, May 11, 2011]

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan writes in a research note this morning that “there are concerns that the People’s Bank of China will prohibit foreign ownership of a payment solution and having Alipay owned 100% by a domestic entity will be required to obtain the appropriate licenses.”

Rohan points out that Alipay is the largest online platform in the world in terms of registered users, transactions and total payment volume; he’s been estimating the company’s value at $2 billion. The company has 550 million registered users, compared with 94.4 million for PayPal at the end of 2010.
On May 10, 2011, Yahoo disclosed that its $1 billion investment in a strategic partnership with Alibaba Group Holdings Limited, China’s largest e-commerce company, had likely been severely impaired by the misappropriation of Alipay, Alibaba’s most valuable asset, from Alibaba to another private company, controlled by Alibaba’s Chairman, Jack Ma. On May 15, 2011, Yahoo announced that Alibaba, Yahoo and Softbank Corporation were “engaged in and committed to productive negotiations to resolve the outstanding issues related to Alipay in a manner that serves the interests of all shareholders as soon as possible.” News reports indicate that Alibaba received $46 million for Alipay’s assets, which securities analysts valued at $5 billion.
The complaint alleges that Yahoo was informed no later than March 31, 2011 that Alipay’s structure had been shifted from Alibaba, therefore reducing the value of Yahoo’s investment in Alibaba by billions of dollars. The complaint also alleges that Yahoo failed to develop a strategy to recover the value it had in Alibaba, knowing that Chinese regulations regarding foreign ownership had been anticipated to change as far back as 2009, which would require Yahoo or Alibaba to divest themselves of Alipay. As a result of the alleged misstatements and omissions, Yahoo’s stock traded at artificially inflated prices during the class period.
Kendall Law Group was founded by a former federal judge, includes a former United States Attorney, prosecutors and securities lawyers who are experienced in complex securities litigation. The firm has been counsel in numerous merger and acquisition cases nationwide, including some of the largest transactions in the United States.
Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/24e22a/china_thirdparty) has announced the addition of the “China Third-party Payment Industry Report, 2010-2013” report to their offering.
Third-party payment refers to an Internet-based means of exchange that provides online (Internet) and offline (telephone & mobile phone) payment channels enabling user-to-merchant online payment, fund settlement, inquiries and statistics, etc.
In 2010, market transaction volume of third-party payment broke through RMB 1 trillion and registered RMB 1.1395 trillion [$176.2B] in China. However, third-party payment market is still in its infancy stage and is expected to develop rapidly in the next several years.
People’s Bank of China issued Regulation on Payment Service of Non-financial Organization on 14 Jun. 2010, with the aim to officially supervise the domestic third-party payment industry. On 26 May 2011, People’s Bank of China granted the first batch of Payment Transaction License to 27 third-party payment companies including Alipay, Tenpay, ChinaPay and 99Bill. In terms of market share, the top three third-party payment service providers in China are Alipay, Tenpay and ChinaPay.
My insert here from the How Alibaba unlocked the door to online shopping in China video above:

China's online payment companies -- 2012 market share - excluding banks

Alipay: Alipay is a third-party payment platform that belongs to Alibaba group. As of Dec. 2010, its number of registered users broke through 550 million, and daily transaction value reached RMB 2.6 billion [$402M] and daily number of transactions hit 11 million. It is expected that the annual transaction value of Alipay will achieve about RMB 1 trillion [$154.6B] in each of the next two years.
TenPay: As Tencent’s third-party payment platform, TenPay accumulated 150 million personal users and over 400 thousand cooperative merchants till Dec. 2010.
ChinaPay: ChinaPay is a third-party payment service provider with diversified business. Its business growth is mainly driven by those monopolistic fields including fund and insurance online payment. However, this monopolistic advantage is gradually diminished. In addition, with limited investment, online payment service is not the core business of ChinaPay, and its competitiveness is weak.
99Bill: As of 30 Apr. 2011, with transaction volume over RMB 100 billion, 99bill has 91 million registered users and over 980 thousand business partners. During 2008-2009, 99Bill shifted its major business to the segment markets, including insurance and fund industries, to get involved in the differential competition.
YeePay: YeePay is an integrated payment platform. Till 26 Nov. 2010, with over 10 thousand large and medium signed merchants, its daily transaction volume and number of transactions exceeded RMB200 million and 1 million respectively. Moreover, YeePay plays a leading role in the telephone payment market. During 2008-2010, it experienced rapid development in the fields of aviation, telecommunication and education.
Chinabank Payments: The lower online payment price is the key competitive advantage of Chinabank Payments. In addition, its offline credit card payment business has the early entry advantage.
Shengpay: With a registered capital of RMB250 million and about 250 employees, Shengpay is an independent third-party payment service provider belongs to Shanda Group. It provides payment solution for Shanda’s business including literature, music, film, recreation and tourism.

Key Topics Covered:

  1. Overview of Third-Party Payment
  2. Market Environment of Third-Party Payment Industry
  3. Market Analysis of Third-Party Payment Industry
  4. Competition
  5. Key Licensed Enterprises
  6. Other Key Enterprises
  7. Market Forecast of Third-Party Payment Industry

Companies Mentioned:

  • Alipay
  • TenPay
  • 99Bill
  • YeePay
  • iPS
  • Chinabank Payments
  • ChinaPnR
  • Shengpay
  • All In Pay
  • KuaiPay
  • Beijing Digital Wangfujing Technology Ltd. Co.
  • Property & Credit (Zihexin)
  • Open Union
  • Qiandai
  • SmartPay
  • Lakala
  • Shanghai FFT Information Service Ltd.
  • China UnionPay Merchant Services Co., Ltd.
  • Beijing UnionPay
  • ChinaPay
  • PayEase
  • Beijing Cloudnet Internet Co., Ltd.
  • Union Mobile Pay (UMPay)
  • BestPay
  • 95epay
  • Ecpss

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/24e22a/china_thirdparty

Dell’s all Intel tablets and laptops targeting the evolving mobile workforce even with their most consumer specific Android tablets

October 3, 2013 8:09 am / Leave a comment

Dell is 100% committed to Intel (“for speed, responsiveness, and battery efficiency”) from now on which was, nevertheless, not discovered by the media. Otherwise the essence was well expressed by these Oct 2, 2013 media reports (being similar to others):

Read also: The long awaited Windows 8.1 breakthrough opportunity with the new Intel “Bay Trail-T”, “Bay Trail-M” and “Bay Trail-D” SoCs? [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Sept 14-26, 2013]

Conspicuously missing from Dell’s lineup is any trace of Windows RT, the stripped-down version of Windows designed for ARM processors. Dell was the last remaining Windows RT supporter outside of Microsoft, at least until the company discontinued its XPS 10 last month. When we asked Dell’s director of tablets, Bill Gorden, he said the company’s still considering its options. “We’re very happy with the direction of Windows 8.1, and we have multiple screen sizes and capabilities there,” he said. “We’re not sure what our plans are for Windows RT at the moment.”

However, Gorden suggests that we should take the Venue launch as a sign that Dell isn’t planning to abandon the consumer market after it goes private. “I think the introduction of all these devices is really a signal of how important end-user computing is to Dell,” he toldThe Verge. “I think you’re going to start seeing Dell start being prominent in the consumer space.”

What was announced (according to Dell’s press release, available here at the very end):

The Dell Venue 7, Venue 8, Venue 8 Pro, and new XPS 15 will be available from October 18 on www.dell.com in the United States and select countries around the world. The Venue 11 Pro, XPS 11 and the updated XPS 13 with touch will be available in November. Starting prices are as follows:

  • Venue 7 [Android]: $149.99
  • Venue 8 [Android]: $179.99
  • Venue 8 Pro: $299.99
  • Venue 11 Pro: $499.99
  • New XPS 15: $1,499.99
  • XPS 11: $999.99
  • New XPS 13: $999.99

…

All Dell Venue tablets are based on Intel processing power for speed, responsiveness, and battery efficiency. The Dell Venue 7 and Dell Venue 8 [Android tablets] feature Intel Atom Z2760 (“Clover Trail”) processors, while the Dell Venue 8 Pro and Dell Venue 11 Pro [Windows 8.1 tablets] feature the new Intel Atom quad-core processors, code named “Bay Trail.” The Venue 11 Pro offers up to 4th Generation Intel Core [”Haswell”] i3 and i5 processor options and Intel vPro for manageability.

Dell messages:

From the press release:

  • New Dell Venue tablets offer the ability to connect, share, and access content with ease
  • XPS 11 is the world’s thinnest, lightest and most compact 2-in-1 in the world with the world’s first Quad HD display on an 11.6-inch 2-in-1
  • XPS 15 powerhouse laptop offers the world’s first 15.6-inch Quad HD+ display for jaw-dropping visuals and the ultimate experience

…

Dell Venue tablets are designed to give people on-the-go a wide-selection of sizes and options to meet their varying needs. From 8 and 11-inch Windows-based tablets complete with keyboard and stylus options, to the 7 and 8-inch Android tablets, Dell has created a dedicated brand of tablets to meet the needs of customers who are the epitome of the evolving workforce.

For New Dell Venue 7 and 8 Tablets [DellVlog YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

Stay connected with Venue 7 and 8 tablets featuring fast Intel processors and easy to use Android OS.

For New Dell Venue 8 Pro Tablet [DellVlog YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

Connect to what you need easily, quickly and securely with the Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet [powered by Intel quad-core processor].

For New Dell Venue 11 Pro Tablet [DellVlog YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

http://www.dell.com/tablets
The no compromise tablet for those that expect more and do more [featuring Intel Core processors].

For Enabling the mobile workforce with Dell [DellVlog YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

Learn more about the evolving mobile workforce, bring your own device (BYOD) trends and the opportunity they present you as a Dell partner.

For Dell Venue 11 Pro Tablet for Work and Home [DellVlog YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

See how the Venue 11 Pro goes from your home life to work life, with no compromises.

Only here, and only inside there is a Microsoft related message (while Intel is everywhere here and especially in the above videos):

    • Stay connected with the Intel Core based Dell Venue 11 Pro tablet.
    • Keep in touch with loved ones across the globe.
    • Portability and performance in one device.
    • Chair projects with the stunning Full HD wide angle screen.
    • Run Windows 8.1 and Microsoft Office powered by Intel processors.
    • Interact like never before with near-field communication.
    • Present new ideas with Miracast technology.
    • Designed for on the go or on the couch.
    • Do more with the do it all Dell Venue 11 Pro tablet.

While at least one media source, CNET was much more Microsoft/Windows focussed:

The Dell Venue 8 Pro delivers full Windows 8.1 in a $299 package [CNETTV YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

http://cnet.co/19ZguLY
Dell’s Venue 8 Pro is a full Windows 8.1 tablet with an 8-inch screen.

The Dell Venue 7 and 8 mark Dell’s return to Android tablets [CNETTV YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

http://cnet.co/1bw0Mdk
Dell finally moves beyond the Streak with two new Android tablets.

Get accessorized with the Dell Venue 11 Pro [CNETTV YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

http://cnet.co/173mhOm
The 11-inch Venue 11 Pro from Dell features a removable battery and plenty of accessory options.

The Dell XPS 11 and 12 feature unique hybrid designs [CNETTV YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

http://cnet.co/1fJpImK
Both the Dell XPS 11 and 12 are take traditional hybrid design and throws it on its ear.

The Dell XPS 13 and 15 feature high-end specs and thin designs [CNETTV YouTube channel, Oct 2, 2013]

http://cnet.co/1brtC1U
Dell goes ultra high-end with its XPS 13 and 15 laptops.

Press release from the company:

Dell Introduces New Line of Tablets and Updated XPS Laptops: Create, Share and Access Content from Virtually Anywhere [Oct 2, 2013]

  • New Dell Venue tablets offer the ability to connect, share, and access content with ease
  • XPS 11 is the world’s thinnest, lightest and most compact 2-in-1 in the world with the world’s first Quad HD display on an 11.6-inch 2-in-1
  • XPS 15 powerhouse laptop offers the world’s first 15.6-inch Quad HD+ display for jaw-dropping visuals and the ultimate experience

Dell today took a bold step in unveiling a new family of tablets and new laptops, including a 2-in-1 Ultrabook. The Dell Venue line of tablets is comprised of four new ultrathin models designed to address the changing way people live and work today. Dell’s “damned sexy” tablets, as described by leading Enderle Group analyst, Rob Enderle, deliver leading performance and quality, backed by Intel processing technology. With compact designs that make it easy to stay connected on the go, the Dell Venue tablets have an exquisite fit and finish.

In addition to the versatile new Dell Venue tablets, Dell is introducing new XPS laptops, each with breakthrough displays for a phenomenal viewing experience with vibrant, crisp images in any available screen size. The new XPS 11, the thinnest, most compact 2-in-1 in the world, also features the first Quad HD (2560 x 1440) display on an 11.6-inch 2-in-1. The XPS 15 multimedia powerhouse boasts a stunningly thin design, and offers as an option the first 15.6-inch Quad HD+ (3200 x 1800) display in the world, which is the highest resolution available on a laptop of that size. Dell is also refreshing its award-winning XPS 13 Ultrabook with faster processors, touch Full HD (1920 x 1080) display and improved battery life. With these three laptops, Dell is leading the industry with the highest resolution displays possible.

“People today expect the best experience possible from their technology – they are counting on it to keep them connected and move with them, wherever they are,” said Sam Burd, vice president Dell Personal Computing Group. “The new Dell Venue tablets and XPS laptops give customers the stellar experience they expect from us, with performance that allows them to work how they want, when they want, in a design they’ll be proud to show off and own.”

Dell Venue Tablets: Connect, Share and Access Content with Ease
Dell Venue tablets are designed to give people on-the-go a wide-selection of sizes and options to meet their varying needs. From 8 and 11-inch Windows-based tablets complete with keyboard and stylus options, to the 7 and 8-inch Android tablets, Dell has created a dedicated brand of tablets to meet the needs of customers who are the epitome of the evolving workforce.

  • The Dell Venue 8 Pro and Dell Venue 11 Pro Windows 8.1-based tablets combine the level of performance, design and responsiveness end-users love while giving IT departments what they need – the ability to integrate into an existing corporate environment with full compatibility with current Windows applications and Microsoft Office integration. Both tablets feature optional advanced security features and services such as TPM and Dell Enterprise Services.
  • The lightweight Dell Venue 8 Pro runs Windows 8.1, has a bright HD IPS display, advanced connectivity options and provides long battery life so range anxiety is no longer an issue. People can also stay productive with Office 2013 Home & Student, included with the device, and the optional Dell Active Stylus.
  • The Dell Venue 11 Pro, also based on Windows 8.1, provides ultimate 2-in-1 flexibility with the power of an Ultrabook, convenience of a detachable keyboard and experience of a desktop. Unlike competitive tablets, it has a user removable/replaceable battery, and its large, Full HD display with wide viewing angles makes it easy to read and create content while staying mobile. It is also available with a variety of keyboard and stylus options:
    • Dell Active Stylus makes it easy to annotate, draw or take notes.
    • Dell Slim Keyboard, designed for travel, also serves as a cover for the screen when folded up.
    • Dell Mobile Keyboard with integrated battery provides all day productivity with a full-sized keyboard while extending the battery life.
    • Dell Tablet Desktop Dock delivers full productivity on a desk with USB 3.0 ports, and dual display out ports for display extension.
  • The Dell Venue 7 and Dell Venue 8 Android-based tablets are affordable, feature-rich tablets for people who want to be constantly connected wherever they are. Both tablets have an upscale fit and finish, and are designed with longevity in mind with the right components so that customers will be just as delighted with their tablet one year from now, as they are on the day they take it out of the box.

All Dell Venue tablets are based on Intel processing power for speed, responsiveness, and battery efficiency. The Dell Venue 7 and Dell Venue 8 feature Intel Atom Z2760 (“Clover Trail”) processors, while the Dell Venue 8 Pro and Dell Venue 11 Pro feature the new Intel Atom quad-core processors, code named “Bay Trail.” The Venue 11 Pro offers up to 4th Generation Intel Core i3 and i5 processor options and Intel vPro for manageability.

Dell XPS Laptops and 2-in-1: The Ultimate Experience with Gorgeous Displays
Dell’s award-winning XPS laptop line just got even better with the new XPS 15 powerhouse laptop, the introduction of the XPS 11 2-in-1, and an update to the flagship XPS 13 Ultrabook. In keeping with the XPS tradition of offering the best computing experience in any product category, the XPS laptops and 2-in-1 feature machined aluminum, carbon fiber, vibrant displays, and Corning Gorilla Glass NBT for performance, durability and the ultimate experience.

  • Starting at 2.5lbs[i] and just 11-15mm thin, the XPS 11 is the world’s thinnest, lightest and most compact 2-in-1 Ultrabook available today, offering a tablet-first design with laptop functionality. It easily transitions from tablet to laptop with a 360 degree rotating hinge design, and an innovative solid surface backlit touch keyboard that provides a superb experience from lap to bag. With a Quad HD (2560 x 1440) display, the highest resolution display in an 11.6-inch 2-in-1 today, the XPS 11 has a bright, crisp viewing experience. The display also features True Color viewing powered by eeColor, which enables customers to enjoy true, rich consistent color in nearly any lighting environment.
  • The XPS 15 continues to be a multimedia powerhouse delivering the highest resolution in its class, and incredible power in an ultra-thin, light wedge design, starting at 4.44lbsi. The XPS 15 is the first 15.6-inch laptop in the world to feature a Quad HD+ display, and also available with a touch option, boasts over 5.7 million pixels – five times the amount of standard HD – for jaw-dropping resolution. Designed for creative enthusiasts, the XPS 15 packs 4th Generation Intel Core i5 and i7 quad core processor options and NVIDIA discrete graphics options. Every XPS 15 boots and resumes within seconds with hard drive configuration options from 500GB to 1TB[ii], both with a 32GB mSATA SSD, to a 512GB solid state drive, all including Intel Rapid Start Technology[iii].
  • The award-winning XPS 13, with its 13.3-inch, edge-to-edge display that innovatively fits into a footprint similar to an 11-inch laptop, is razor thin and light, starting at under 3lbsi. It is now even faster with 4thgeneration Intel Core processors, Intel HD 4400 graphics, and has longer battery life for the mobile professional who values a sleek design, responsiveness and ultimate mobility. Its Full HD display provides a brilliant viewing experience and is now even more versatile with a touch option.

“Dell appears to have its innovative mojo back,” said Tim Bajarin, President of Creative Strategies. “These new products clearly emphasize Dell’s commitment to create innovative mobile solutions for businesses and consumers and I believe represent some of the best products they have made in many years.”

Personal and Professional Content Anytime, Anywhere
The Dell PocketCloud application is pre-installed on all XPS and Venue products, helping users build their own “personal cloud” and remotely manage personal and professional content. By combining PocketCloud with the portability of the new Venue tablets and XPS laptops, mobile workers will be able to enjoy an easy and connected experience with access to all of their apps and content from virtually anywhere.

Get the Most Out of Your Technology with Dell Services
Dell customers can get the most out of their technology with Dell Services, dedicated to keeping them connected and productive, whether they’re using their Dell Venue tablet or XPS purchase for work or home. In addition to the Dell Limited Hardware Warranty, consumers can elect to include additional protection such as Accidental Damage Service[iv], Premium Phone Support and Rapid Return for Repair after Remote Diagnosis[v], which means that their system will be repaired and returned to them within 3-5 business days after remote diagnosis. Likewise, business customers can be rest assured that their devices will fit seamlessly and securely into their corporate IT environment with Dell Enterprise Services like ProSupport[vi] on the Dell Venue 8 Pro and Venue 11 Pro tablets.

Availability and Pricing
The Dell Venue 7, Venue 8, Venue 8 Pro, and new XPS 15 will be available from October 18 on www.dell.com in the United States and select countries around the world. The Venue 11 Pro, XPS 11 and the updated XPS 13 with touch will be available in November. Starting prices are as follows:

  • Venue 7: $149.99
  • Venue 8: $179.99
  • Venue 8 Pro: $299.99
  • Venue 11 Pro: $499.99
  • New XPS 15: $1,499.99
  • XPS 11: $999.99
  • New XPS 13: $999.99

About Dell
Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. For more information, visit www.dell.com.

Dell World
Join us at Dell World 2013, Dell’s premier customer event exploring how technology solutions and services are driving business innovation. Learn more at www.dellworld.com and follow #DellWorldon Twitter.

Dell, Dell Venue and XPS are trademarks of Dell Inc. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

[i] Weights vary depending on configuration and manufacturing variability.
[ii] Hard drives: GB means 1 billion bytes and TB equals 1 trillion bytes; actual capacity varies with preloaded material and operating environment and will be less.
[iii] Intel Rapid Start Technology: Requires a Solid-State Drive (SSD) or properly configured HDD + SSD.
For copy of Limited Hardware Warranty, write Dell USA LP, Attn: Warranties, One Dell Way, Round Rock, TX 78682 or see http://www.dell.com/warranty
[iv] Accidental Damage Service excludes theft, loss and damage due to fire, flood or other acts of nature, or intentional damage. Customer may be required to return unit to Dell. For complete details, visitwww.dell.com/servicecontracts
[v] Remote Diagnosis is determination by online/phone technician of cause of issue, which may take multiple extended sessions. If issue is covered by Limited Hardware Warranty and not resolved remotely, shipping instructions will be provided. Next Business Day shipping not available in all areas, which may delay repair and return times. Other conditions apply. For complete details about Rapid Return for Repair after Remote Diagnosis Service, visit Dell.com/servicecontracts.
[vi] Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visitwww.dell.com/servicedescriptions.

Microsoft could be acquired in years to come by Amazon? The joke of the day, or a certain possibility (among other ones)?

September 16, 2013 12:40 pm / Leave a comment

Discussion with one of my friends in the profession, let’s call him Gabriel (ezt diszkutáltuk itt Gábrielként szereplő szakmai barátommal az elmúlt 24 órában):

GABRIEL:
“the Wintel camp is destined to fail since the two giants have been keeping most of the profits to themselves, which is indirectly pushing many players to Google’s ecosystem” [see: The question mark over Wintel’s future will hang in the air for two more years]
Continuing this logic Apple is the most vulnerable one. It is also true, however, if there is no profit, no investment, innovation and progress. Rather, I see it as the old world order is overturned, and there is a new world order being formed, where there will be  no dominant player like Wintel back in time, but there will be big groups of power. Majority of the profit will be harvested by dominant integrated players, like Samsung and Lenovo. The effect of transistor radio has been started to get felt, and there is a need of fundamental business model transformation. This is why MS is changing a lot, in the field of Devices & Services. Gadgets are getting cheaper and cheaper, OEMs do not want and can’t pay license fees, and therefore HW and SW integration is needed in order to offer a better user experience, and Cloud Services is going to be the big battlefield. And here’s the big loser could Apple, and there will be a giant battle between MS, Google and Amazon.
GABRIEL:
“the Wintel camp is destined to fail since the two giants have been keeping most of the profits to themselves, which is indirectly pushing many players to Google’s ecosystem” [ld. The question mark over Wintel’s future will hang in the air for two more years]
Ezt a logikat folytatva, az alma a legsebezhetobb. Viszont az is igaz ha nincs profit, nincs befektates, innovacio es haladas. En inkabb ugy latom hogy a regi vilagrand felborult, es kialakuloban van egy uj vilagrend, ahold nem less dominans jatekos mint a Wintel idejen, de azonban lesznek nagy ero-csoportok. A profit nagy reszet az dominans integralt jatekosok mint a Samsung es a Lenovo fogjak aratni. Elkezdodott a tranzisztor radio effektus es alapveto uzleti modell transzformaciora van szukseges. Ezert valt egy nagyot a MS is, a Devices & Services teruleten. A kutyuk egyre olcsobbak lesznek, az OEM-ek nem akarnak es tudnak licensz dijt fizetni, es igy szukseges a HW es SW integracio hogy jobb felhasznaloi elmenyt nyujtson, es a Cloud Services lesz a kovetkezo nagy csatater. Es itt a nagy vesztes az alma lehet, es a MS, a gugli es az Amazon kozott lesz a titani csata.
SÁNDOR:
IMHO the great battle will be between Amazon and Alibaba-Tencent-Xiaomi-Baidu etc., the Chinese company or group going out of the fight in Mainland China into a world domination. I will not be surprised if on the Western side Amazon will first acquire ONE MICROSOFT now turned to the right direction (it is worth for everybody to orient him/herself towards Seattle), and then even Google. Facebook and the global financial interests clustering around it will be the third major group, which will enter the battle after the 2016 both with the great Western technologies group and the big technology group/company coming out of the Mainland China as a global force by that time. The great strength of the Facebook-rooted group will be the Facebook currency (not a typo), which will be able to surpass the U.S. dollar as much as any other currency. Now, this will of course come well after 2016. … and I dare advance this projection not as some kind of a SEER, but based on hard-core current facts, trends etc., as well as the result of 3 and a half years of unrelenting work.
SÁNDOR:
A nagy csata SZVSZ az Amazon és az Alibaba-Tencent-Xiaomi-Baidu stb. közötti belkínai küzdelemből világuralomra jutó kínai cég vagy csoportosulás között lesz. Nem lepődnék meg, ha nyugati oldalról először a most jó irányba váltó ONE MICROSOFT-ot venné meg az Amazon (érdemes Seattle-be orientálódni mindnkinek), majd még a Google-t is. A Facebook és a körülötte csoportosuló globális tőkeérdekeltségek alkotta együttes lesz a harmadik nagy csoport, mely majd 2016 után lép csatába úgy a nagy nyugati technológiai csoporttal, mint a Belkínából addigra globálissá lett nagy technológiai csoporttal/céggel. A Facebook gyökerű csoport nagy erőssége lesz a Facebook valuta (nem tévedés), mely úgy a dollárt, mint bármi más devizát überelni lesz képes. No persze ez már bőven 2016 után. … és ezt egyáltalán nem valamiféle látnokként, hanem kőkemény jelenlegi tények, trendek stb. alapján, valamint 3 és fél éves lankadatlan munka eredményeként merem előre vetíteni.
GABRIEL:
Amazon buys the MS? This is worth of being the joke of the day. Thanks for the entertainment. I am on a bike tour and just stopped. The guys asked why I started all of a sudden to guffaw. …
[later] I just read over to the end. Even more, they will swallow even Google? Oh wow! And how, pray tell, will they do this? Oops! Giant market cap, but only just marginably profitable. Back last year they were in loss. So how will they scrape together 600 billion dollars? Perhaps the Chinese People’s Army will lend them? Amazon Q3 2012 earnings: $13.18 billion revenue, net loss of $274 million [engadget, Oct 25, 2012]
GABRIEL:
Az Amazon megveszi a MS-t? Ez feler a nap viccevel. Koszi a szorakoztatast . Motoros turan vagyok es epp megalltunk. A haverok kerdeztek hogy miert kezdtem hirtelen hangosan rohogni. …
[később] Most olvastam vegig. Sot, meg a guglit is bekebeleznek? Oh wow! Es hogyan, tennek, pray tell? Oops! Oriasi piaci ertek, de epp hogy marginalisan profitabilisak. Tavaly meg vesztesegesek voltak. Szoval hogyan fognak 600 Milliard Dollart osszakapirgalni? Talan a kinai nephadsereg majd kolcson ad nekik? Amazon Q3 2012 earnings: $13.18 billion revenue, net loss of $274 million [engadget, Oct 25, 2012]
SÁNDOR:
My dear friend Gabhri’-el  (“man of God“)!
I did not want to disappoint you. My point was simply to indicate in a gentle way that in the current, quite unpredictable situation even the most unimaginable outcomes are as much possible as yours. Glance at the posts I referred to in the closing part of The question mark over Wintel’s future will hang in the air for two more years post of mine, and I hope you will agree with the above “indication statement” at least. Regarding the current market caps vs. that of Amazon I will draw your attention to certain historical stock prices given below. I will also dare to comment on them as suits my purpose here.
 SÁNDOR:

Kedves Gábri-Él (“Úr embere”)!
Nem szerettem volna csalódást okozni neked. Egyszerűen azt kivántam volna érzékeltetni, szelíd formában, hogy a jelenlegi, meglehetősen megjósolhatatlan helyzetben még a leginkább elképzelhetetlen kimenetek is legalább annyira lehetségesek, mint a tiéd. Vess egy pillantást a The question mark over Wintel’s future will hang in the air for two more years című bejegyzésem befejező részében hivatkozott bejegyzésekre, és remélem legalább a fenti “érzékeltetési kijelentésemmel” egyet fogsz érteni. Ami az Amazonéval szembeni, jelenlegi részvénypiaci cégértékeléseket  illeti az alábbiakban felhívnám figyelmedet bizonyos történelmi tőzsdeárazásokra. Veszem a bátorságot magamnak ahhoz is, hogy a szándékaim szerint megjegyzéseket fűzzek ezekhez.

imageLet’s see first Microsoft vs. Nokia (lássuk először a Microsoft kontra Nokia összehasonlítást):
– Nokia had exactly 10 times higher share price ($39.72) at its latest peak (October 2007)than the one on the August 30, 2013 ($3.90)
– Microsoft’s latest peak of $36.81 on the same date never recovered ever since despite its continuous good profit and cash accumulation performance
– Even the acquisition of Nokia’s Devices & Services business on Sept 3, 2013 did not help much, while Nokia’s share jumpstarted by 60% since then (see the combined small chart on the right by clicking on it for a detailed comparison since the acquisition)

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imageThen go to an Amazon vs. Google comparison (lássuk ezután az Amazon kontra Google összehasonlítást):
– Amazon’s share price is growing since November 2008 when it was $42.70 and it came to around $300 for the last two months.
– At same time Google’s share price was growing at such a pace in much earlier period, since Nov 17, 2008 ($262.43) to Dec 21, 2009 ($619.98), then after sharp decline during 2010 recovered to a generally below $600 level till July 9, 2012 ($576.52), only after which started an Amazon-like sharp till May 13, 2013 ($909.18), then continuing to be mostly below of that with rise to $889.07 for the week of Sept 9, 2013. See a recent timeframe on the right.

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Final observations and conclusions:

  1. Microsoft swallowed the once most promising part of Nokia’s business, the one for which Nokia was famous for. Why the same thing could not happen to Microsoft when its upcoming 2 years of market trials will end in a similar niche market result in the Devices & Services space now to be joined under Stephen Elop’s leadership? That is Amazon acquiring that part of Microsoft the same way Microsoft that part of Nokia. Two years from now Amazon would not want anything else than that business only to join with one of its own (Kindle etc.). Meanwhile the rest of Microsoft will continue as an enterprise vendor with an alternative cloud platform to consumers as well.
  2. If that is a definite scenario (albeit one of many others) why the same thing could not happen to Google’s overall Motorola device and Android software business, thus leaving Google with classic advertising part. 

Xiaomi announcements: from Mi3 to Xiaomi TV

September 5, 2013 11:27 am / 1 Comment on Xiaomi announcements: from Mi3 to Xiaomi TV

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An Official Video of the MI3 & MITV Launch Event (with English & Chinese subtitles). HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FOR REAL UNDERSTANDING OF XIAOMI!)

Read before: Assesment of the Xiaomi phenomenon before the global storm is starting on Sept 5 [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Aug 30, 2013]
Watch before: Smartphone Maker Xiaomi Takes on Apple in China [Bloomberg TV, Sept 6, 2013] Xiaomi CEO and Founder Lei Jun discusses the company’s growth and competition with Apple on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.” image
Read after: Exclusive: Hugo Barra Talks About His Future at Xiaomi and Why He Really Left Google [AllTingsD, Sept 12, 2013] … “There is no question the phone business is very low margin today, but they want to get to a place where they can sell the device at cost and then sell high-margin services to make that phone experience even better,” said Barra. … “The aspiration for the founders is that Xiaomi will become a global company that happens to be in China,” he said. “If I do my job right, in a few years, the world will be talking about Xiaomi in the same way that they talk about Google and Apple today.”

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Introducing Xiaomi MIUI MI3 (3D) [MrMiui YouTube channel, Sept 5, 2013]

Check this thread for Xiaomi New Product Convention 2013http://en.miui.com/thread-7486-1-1.html (Live)

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Xiaomi … 2 hours ago

ON AIR [Xiaomi 2013 New Product Announcement Event]
#MiPhone 3: The Fastest Smartphone#

  • Dual Platform – Nvidia Tegra 4 quad-core processors (1.8GHz A15 + A15) with 72 GeForce GPU cores + Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 (8974AB quad-core 2.3GHz + 28nm HPM)). MiPhone 3’s overall performance increased 40% (compare to MiPhone 2S).
  • Screen – Sharp and LG 5-inch 1080P IPS display with ultra-sensitive touch. It works even when your figures are wet. You can set to recognize your figures even wearing gloves;
  • Memory – 2GB LPDDR3 RAM+16GB eMMC4.5 flash
  • Battery – 3050mAh battery;
  • Camera – SONY 13 MP Exmor RS CMOS back camera, 2MP BSI front camera
  • Supports NFC & 2.4/5G WiFi

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Xiaomi … Yesterday

ON AIR [Xiaomi 2013 New Product Announcement Event]
#MiPhone 3: The Fastest Smartphone

  • Size: 114mm×72mm×8.1mm, weight: only 145g;
  • Six official colors;
  • Camera comes with Intelligent beauty corrector. It can also identify age and gender.
  • The GPS can preserve the satellite trajectory for 7 days.
  • Immersion vibration function with situational vibrate mode.
  • Price – USD$327 for 16GB; USD$408 for 64GB.

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Nvidia has recently started receiving orders for its Tegra 4 processor, and in addition to the recently launched Mi3 smartphone from China-based vendor Xiaomi, Nvidia has also landed orders for Microsoft’s second-generation Surface RT as well as Asustek, Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard (HP) tablets, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.
The Mi3 is the first smartphone to adopt the Tegra 4 processor.
Nvidia is also supplying its Tegra 4 to Asustek for its 10-inch New Transformer Pad tablet, HP for its 10-inch Slatebook 10 x2 and Toshiba for its 10-inch Excite Pro. Nvidia is reportedly also considering releasing an own-brand tablet.
Nvidia has also been aggressively promoting its Shield gaming device, trying to compete against the 3DS and PS Vita with a price of US$299.

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Photos Taken by Xiaomi MI3 (HD) 小米手机随手拍 (高清) [MrMiui YouTube channel, Sept 6, 2013], watch in either 720p or 1080p HD, and you could even watch in the original HD

MIUI is one of the most popular Android ROMs in the world. It is based on Android 2.3 and 4.1, featuring a rich user experience and user customizable themes. MIUI is updated every Friday based on feedback from its users. Now with over 20 million users and 17 MIUI fan sites worldwide, MIUI is the choice of many Android users globally.

Immersion Enters Multi-Year License Agreement With Xiaomi [press release, Sept 5, 2013]

Recently announced Xiaomi Mi3 smartphone is the first to launch with advanced tactile effects
SHANGHAI & SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Immersion Corporation (Nasdaq:IMMR), the leading developer and licensor of touch feedback technology, today announced that it has entered into a broad multi-year licensing arrangement with Xiaomi, one of the fastest growing smartphone makers in China, and that the recently released Xiaomi Mi3 smartphone uses Immersion’s TouchSense® technology to add new dimension of engagement in Xiaomi’s popular MIUI interface. Users can experience Immersion technology in two new downloadable tactile themes available in the MIUI storefront, as well as the crisp, intuitive tactile effects integrated throughout the Mi3 user interface and Tool applications. The Mi3 is Xiaomi’s first smartphone to come to market under the new license agreement between Xiaomi and Immersion, which covers Immersion’s Basic Haptics IP and select TouchSense and Integrator software solutions.
“We are pleased to work closely with Xiaomi to design tactile effects that create a rich user experience and deliver a distinctive and branded feel to MIUI, Xiaomi’s custom Android interface,” explains Dennis Sheehan, Immersion’s Sr. Vice President of Sales & Marketing. “Xiaomi is our first direct mobile OEM licensee in China, and this relationship further validates the value of our IP portfolio and software solutions. With Xiaomi’s focus on design and innovation, we’re looking forward to collaborating in the future to bring advanced tactile experiences to mobile users in China.”
The Xiaomi Mi3 smartphone is available in China online at www.xiaomi.com.

Mi3 users who want to experience tactile effects have many options:

    • Users can select which strength of tactile effects they experience throughout the handset by customizing the vibration settings menu, found in the Settings/Sound menu

    • Mi3 Tool apps, including Compass, Calculator, Clock, Torch & Recorder include customized haptic effects to create a more intuitive user interface

    • The Iron Man and Gun MIUI themes are enhanced with realistic tactile effects, and are available for download from the MIUI Themes app.

      “The Xiaomi Mi3 was designed to be easy to use, personalized and cutting-edge. The addition of haptics seamlessly extends these values to the consumer through the sense of touch,” explains Lei Jun, Chairman and CEO of Xiaomi. “Immersion’s technology and expertise allows us to create a one-of-a-kind user experience that engages the sense of touch and complements our visual and audio design.”
      For more information on Immersion’s TouchSense technology and Integrator platform, visit http://www.immersion.com/markets/mobile/index.html.
      About Immersion (www.immersion.com)
      Founded in 1993, Immersion (NASDAQ: IMMR) is the leading innovator in haptics, or tactile effects; the company’s touch feedback solutions deliver a more compelling sense of the digital world. Using Immersion’s high-fidelity haptic systems, partners can transform user experiences with unique and customizable touch feedback effects; excite the senses in games, videos and music; restore “mechanical” feel by providing intuitive and unmistakable confirmation; improve safety by overcoming distractions while driving or performing a medical procedure; and expand usability when audio and visual feedback are ineffective. Immersion’s TouchSense technology provides haptics in mobile phone, automotive, gaming, medical and consumer electronics products from world-class companies. With over 1,300 issued or pending patents in the U.S. and other countries, Immersion helps bring the digital universe to life. Hear what we have to say at blog.immersion.com.
      About Xiaomi (www.xiaomi.com)
      Xiaomi is a mobile internet company dedicated to creating the ultimate user experience through its overall portfolio of products including Xiaomi phones, a series of high-performance smartphones; MIUI, a customized UI based on Android; and internet service, such as MiTalk, app store, and game center. Founded in 2010, Xiaomi is headquartered in Beijing, China and has over 3,000 employees.

      Xiaomi … 2 hours ago

      ON AIR [Xiaomi 2013 New Product Announcement Event]
      #MIUI V5 and MiCloud Service#

      Hi to all MIFans!

      -What do you like the most about MIUI? What is your wish list?
      Today, we have over 20 million MIUI users around the world! MIUI team works hard to deliver updates each week. Until today, we have delivered 27 updates for MIUI V5.

      -MiCloud Service
      More than 10.5 million registered users uploading 11 million photos daily to our MiCloud. With MiCloud service, you can sync contacts, messages, settings, photos and videos etc. to our cloud. Feel free to delete and leave enough space for your phone to do more!

      -Share Photo Album and Edit Together
      MIUI V5 added an amazing feature. It allows you to share photo albums and invite people to edit those albums with you. You can simply invite people through texts or generate QR codes for them to scan.

      -Share Public WiFi Access
      Tired of asking for password to access public WiFi? MIUI V5 allows people to share access! Just one setting or simply generate and scan a QR code, you can soon be connected.

      -Send Large File
      Have you experienced problems sending huge files like movies using your phone? With our MIUI V5 new system app, you can send huge files without concerns.

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      Xiaomi TV Eyes On – GizChina [Gizchina YouTube channel, Sept 5, 2013]

      We got some eye’s on time with the new Android Xiaomi TV yesterday in Beijing. The 47-inch smart TV is powered by a quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset, features and LG/Samsung 3D display and has the narrowest borders we have seen of any TV to date!

      Introducing Xiaomi MIUI MiTV (HD) 小米电视 (高清) [MrMiui YouTube channel, Sept 5, 2013], watch in either 720p or 1080p HD, and you could turn on even the 3D

      MIUI is one of the most popular Android ROMs in the world. It is based on Android 2.3 and 4.1, featuring a rich user experience and user customizable themes. MIUI is updated every Friday based on feedback from its users. Now with over 20 million users and 17 MIUI fan sites worldwide, MIUI is the choice of many Android users globally.

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      Xiaomi … about an hour ago

      ON AIR [Xiaomi 2013 New Product Announcement Event] Surprise! Xiaomi 47 inch 3D Smart TV Only USD$490

      -47 inch Polarization 3D HD LCD from LG/Samsung;

      -1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor MPQ8064 for TV , 2GB RAM /8GB flash memory ;

      -TV remote with only 11 buttons, easy to use;

      -Supports dual-band WiFi & Bluetooth 4.0;

      -Run MIUI TV customized version, it is really smart!

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      Jingdong (former 360buy) e-commerce value proposition and ongoing global expansion

      September 2, 2013 7:16 pm / Leave a comment

      Disclaimer: I have no association either with Jingdong (former 360buy), Alibaba Group etc. The sole purpose of this post is to provide a Jingdong related illustrative follow-up to The Upcoming Mobile Internet Superpower [Aug 13, 2013], Assesment of the Xiaomi phenomenon before the global storm is starting on Sept 5 [Aug 30, 2013], and Opinion Leaders and Lead Opinions: Reflections on Steven Sinofsky’s “Era of Continuous Productivity” vision [Sept 1, 2013] posts on my ‘Experiencing the Cloud’ trend-tracking blog.

      Shop at EN.JD.COM [360BuyOfficial, May 22, 2013]

      About Jingdong [from press releases on PR Newswire since July 8, 2013] 

      Jingdong is the largest B2C direct sales e-commerce company in China (source: iResearch). The Company has achieved around 150% annually compounded growth in gross merchandise volume over the past several years and strives to offer the best online shopping experience to its customers. It currently offers more than 9 million SKUs through its B2C direct sales and online marketplace platform. The Company has established nationwide fulfillment capabilities and extensive last mile delivery network to provide superior customer experience. As of June 2013, the Company has 6 major fulfillment centers with 75 warehouses in 30 cities, as well as nearly 1,000 delivery stations and nearly 300 pickup stations nationwide. Through its speedy delivery services, the Company offers same day delivery in 27 major cities and next day delivery in more than 150 cities in China. Its newly launched night delivery and 3-hour delivery services are now available in 6 major cities in China.

      From: China’s e-commerce prize [Bain & Company briefing (survey-based), Aug 30, 2013]

      While pure plays dominate in the market, there is significant growth opportunity for omnichannel merchants. Among the most important developments we found in this year’s survey: When offered the choice, Chinese shoppers prefer retailers’ e-commerce stores over pure play sites like Jingdong. This is an encouraging finding for omnichannel players as they chart their futures. The survey also dispels a concern expressed by retailers that investing in their own website would cannibalize physicalstore sales. In fact, the opposite is true. The website feeds store sales, increasing a retailer’s total combined sales (see Figure 3).

      JD.COM [Announcement and global branding messages] [360BuyOfficial, April 25, 2013]

      360buy.com renames to JD.com. Our global online store en.360buy.com is now offering over an extensive catalogue of products. http://en.360buy.com/

      Jingdong Adopts JD.com as New Domain Name and Unveils Mascot “Joy” [press release, March 30, 2013]

      Jingdong (“Jingdong” or the “Company”), China’s leading direct B2C e-commerce company, announced today that effective immediately, it will adopt the domain name imageJD.com. Jingdong’s previous domain, 360buy.com, will continue to exist, but will redirect users to JD.com. Jingdong also unveiled a new corporate mascot, a dog named “Joy.”
      “Jingdong is delighted to streamline its corporate brand and launch the simpler JD.com domain, which will be easier for our Chinese customers to remember,” said Richard Liu, founder and CEO of Jingdong. “Our new mascot, Joy, represents Jingdong’s loyalty to our customers and our close relationship with their daily life. We remain committed to offering best-in-class user experience to our customers throughout the world.”

      En.360buy.com—–Online Shopping [cc Jane, March 13, 2013]

      Please feel free to contact us: contact@jd.com Visit us: en.360buy.com About us —————————————-­——————– 360buy Group was formed in 1998, and is China’s largest online retailer, growing 3 times faster than the industry average. 360buy Group continued to achieve robust growth in the first quarter of 2012, having a 50.1% share in China’s self-run B2C market and a 22.7% share in China’s B2C market as a whole. The success of the 360buy Group in China prompted a need to offer international customers equal access to Chinese high quality and low price products. Our global online store is now offering over an extensive catalogue of products, and this volume will continue to grow.

      Chinese Online Retailer 360buy Group Expands into Overseas Markets with Launch of International Shopping Site [press release, Oct 18, 2012]

      360buy Group ( www.360buy.com ), the Leader in the Chinese B2C e-Commerce Market, is Expanding into Overseas Markets with the launch of its international English shopping site http:// en.360buy.com . Today, Consumers in about 40 countries and regions worldwide can have Access to High Quality but affordable made-in-China Products in Tandem with a Premium Level of Customer service through the e-Commerce site.
      The international site has distinct advantages by offering over 400,000 products in more than eighteen major categories, including bridal wear, handsets, tablet PCs, electronics, books, sports and outdoor goods as well as automobile accessories. A number of major international delivery firms will be appointed to deliver goods to the site’s consumers. Taking the lead in entering this new frontier will lay a sound foundation for 360buy Group to establish a footprint in the international arena and is also a critical step in the company’s expansion strategy.

      Jingdong Marketplace Expands Vendor Services to Become Total Solution Provider [press release, July 30, 2013]

      Jingdong (“JD.com” or the “Company”), a leading B2C e-commerce company in China, announced today that Jingdong Marketplace will further expand beyond the traditional marketplace platform model and become a total solution provider in the areas of technology, logistics, customer services and financial services to help vendors achieve steady and sustainable growth. Jingdong made the announcement during the Company’s first Marketplace Vendor Summit inBeijing, which hosted more than 500 third-party vendors from a wide range of sectors, including clothing, cosmetics, food and furniture, among others.
      “Jingdong Marketplace’s continued development into a total solution provider will take our vendors’ e-commerce experience to the next level,” said Richard Liu, Founder and CEO of Jingdong. “The great efforts we have made steadily improving our technology, logistics, customer services and financial services will streamline Jingdong Marketplace and create greater value for our customers, vendors and other business partners.”
      “Becoming a total solution provider will further accelerate the development of Jingdong Marketplace, positioning it to be an important growth driver for the next decade,” commented Ye Lan, Jingdong’s Chief Marketing Officer. “By providing vendors with a one-stop solution, we will be able to expand our product categories and SKUs, attract more new customers—especially among growth demographics like women, and encourage repeat purchases. We expect Jingdong Marketplace to contribute significantly to the company’s overall transaction value within a few years.”  
      “Jingdong Marketplace leverages the strengths of our large and quality customer base, our reputation for authentic products and our unparalleled nationwide fulfillment capacity,” said Kate Kui, Vice President responsible for Jingdong Marketplace. “Our comprehensive support platform provides Jingdong Marketplace vendors with data analytics, business intelligence, flexible payment options, speedy settlement services, and a fair and transparent vendor regulatory system. Our commitment to Jingdong Marketplace will help our vendors grow bigger and stronger, improve customer experience and contribute to the company’s overall growth.”
      Ms. Kui also announced the launch of the Jingdong Marketplace Key Accounts Division, which will serve well-known brands and vendors with particularly high growth potential. The Key Accounts team will be dedicated to providing customized solutions for those vendors throughout their supply chain and product life cycle.
      About Jingdong Marketplace
      Since its launch in October 2010, Jingdong Marketplace has experienced rapid growth and contributes an increasingly significant amount to Jingdong’s overall transaction value. It has tens of thousands of third-party vendor partners, offering more than 10 million SKUs. The marketplace business is a total solution provider that serves as an essential driver for Jingdong’s long-term vision of creating a healthy ecosystem that helps its suppliers, vendors, customers and other business partners succeed and thrive.

      More to read:
      – Jingdong leads the E-Commerce charge in China [CKGSB Knowledge, Aug 23, 2013]
      – Global E-Commerce: China’s Jingdong Steps Out [CKGSB Knowledge, Aug 26, 2013]
      – Former Amazon manager takes Chinese e-commerce company global [GeekWire, Aug 16, 2013]

      China’s e-tailing industry has posted 120 percent annual growth since 2003, and online sales in China could reach $650 billion by 2020, according to McKinsey Global Institute.
      …
      Jingdong is still weighing options to expand its offices first into emerging markets or the U.S., Shi said, but the answer to whether the company is going global is clear: “Yes, definitely.”

      General information

      From: Xinhua Insight: Internet industry optimism to buoy China’s economy? [Aug 17, 2013]

      At the 2013 China Internet Conference in Beijing, you felt like you had been teleported into a bazaar.
      …
      “Internet-related consumption of information products and services together with e-commerce are becoming the two biggest drivers of China’s economic growth and restructuring,” said Liang Chunxiao, vice president of the country’s top online trading platform Alibaba Group.
      He predicted that online retail revenues would account for more than 16 percent of China’s total social sales in 2020 when the aggregated e-commerce volume exceeds 28.8 trillion yuan (4.7 trillion dollars).
      “E-commerce will boost related sectors such as logistics and raw materials, and help release the consumption potential in many remote areas,” Liang added.
      China’s Internet economy will take up 6.9 percent of its GDP in 2016, up from 5.5 percent seen in 2010, according to a research report by the Boston Consulting Group last year.
      …
      Alibaba has created 3 million direct jobs and over 100 billion [million] indirect ones, and the number will keep growing, according to Liang.
      Another big online retailer Jingdong hired more than 30,000 delivery men, most of whom are migrant workers, said vice president Zhao Guoqing.

      From: China’s e-commerce prize [Bain & Company briefing (survey-based), Aug 30, 2013]

      The year 2013 will be remembered as the one in which China surpassed the US as the world’s largest digital retail market. Last year, Chinese e-commerce shoppers spent RMB 1.3 trillion [$212 billion] online, a sum that has grown more than 70% annually since 2009 and is expected to continue on its amazing trajectory, reaching RMB 3.3 trillion [$490 billion] by 2015 (see Figure 1). Digital retailing has furiously transformed shopping and purchasing habits, opening up vast opportunities for retailers and brands that pay attention to the nuances of massively changing consumer behavior.
      To better understand how Chinese consumers shop and purchase online—and what implications that has for retailers and brands—Bain & Company surveyed more than 1,300 online shoppers across all city tiers, incomes, ages and education levels. A follow-up to our initial 2012 China e-commerce report, it gave us the opportunity to dig deeper into the dramatic growth numbers to understand how the world of online retailing has changed their behavior (see Figure 2). We found Chinese shoppers have been more willing than shoppers in other markets to use their smartphones to make purchases, are comfortable with third-party payments and online banking, and are happy to rely on third parties for deliveries—as opposed to picking up products in stores. Perhaps most important for the years to come is that we learned that digital retailing now is the major influence on their actual purchasing decisions.

      Logistics revolution in China: Will delivery companies deliver? [CKGSB Knowledge, June 24, 2013]

      …
      Alibaba, the world’s biggest business to business (B2B) online platform, is probably the one facing the biggest challenge. It’s popular customer to customer (C2C) online marketplace Taobao receives more than 20 million orders a day (70% of China’s deliveries). The parcels are delivered by third-party providers that have to deal with China’s underdeveloped delivery infrastructure. This is a common problem the whole industry is facing, prompting other e-commerce players like Jingdong Mall (JD.com which was formerly known as 360buy.com), Suning and VANCL to invest in self-owned and managed logistics systems to ensure they are in control of the whole process.
      In contrast, Alibaba is not interested in owning its delivery network and since 2011 it has been lobbying for what it sees as a “logistics revolution”.
      In May this year, it announced the formation of a new company, Cainiao Network Technology. With Alibaba’s former CEO, Jack Ma, as the Chairman, Cainiao is an alliance of logistics companies, couriers and e-commerce companies such as Yintai Group, Alibaba Group and SF-Express, that are willing to collectively work for the development of a nationwide IT logistics platform. An Alibaba group spokesperson told CKGSB Knowledge that the company is “spearheading the project in cooperation with industry partners with a common goal of enhancing the existing logistics network, whether it be on the IT or physical delivery and warehousing levels”. With a planned initial investment of $16.3 billion, the consortium marks a critical step in Alibaba’s vision of developing what it calls a China Smart Logistics Network within this decade. The ultimate aim is to solve a common problem that the company describes as a “key industry bottleneck for e-commerce growth in China”, the spokesperson says.

      …

      Only sophistication and specialization can ensure that Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall platforms will function efficiently in the future. The company wants to be able to guarantee same-day delivery nationwide. And it believes this will be possible only if all the parties involved form partnerships and strategic alliances to actively participate in the development of a ‘Modern 21st Century Logistics Network’.
      It’s an ambitious attempt. According to the company, over the next 5-10 years, the newly formed Cainiao will oversee the construction of a nationwide warehousing network that will cover a total area as large as 560 American football fields (3 million square meters approximately). Beijing, Tianjin, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta are some of the locations under consideration to build these logistics hubs. Since the project is conceived as an Open Logistics Platform, its partners, Taobao sellers and B2C websites can openly share facilities and all the logistics data.

      China M-commerce Market Research 2012 [Advangent AG, May 15, 2013]

      2012 is a triumphant year for e-commerce in China.
      Alibaba, the owner of Taobao and TMall online store has reached top place as the most profitable Internet company in terms of net profit in Q4; several leading e-commerce providers are contending for larger market share while continuing to fuel the growth of the market. M-commerce is also booming.
      Here’s a look at what China market holds for M-commerce in 2012 and beyond.
      First of all, M-commerce user base has been growing steadily since 2009, it reached 149 million by the end of 2012 and expects to top 352 million by 2015.
      In terms of market share, No one can beat Taobao‘s dominance at 62.7%. Jingdong, previously called 360 buy, remains a distant second at 16.7%, followed by a few other players like QQ, Suning, Vancl, Dung-dung and Yihaodian.
      Moneywise, total revenue of M-commerce was merely 100 million US dollars in 2009, the figure topped 7.7 billion mark in 2012 and expects to reach 40.8 billion by 2015.
      For M-commerce users, almost equal percentage of men and women shop online, the difference is less than 1%. However the number of women users is expected to catch up with men quickly.
      China still has a regionally imbalanced economy. Most M-commerce shoppers come from affluent areas in the eastern part of China characterised by mega cities and dense population. For instance, 31.3%, 22.2% and 17.2% shoppers are from south China, east China and north China respectively where three largest metropolitan cities Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing are located.
      There’re quite few choices for smartphone operation system. Android leads the market at 62.5%, followed by iOS at 32.7% and Symbian at 4.5%, which is still used on large number of low-end devices. Windows has got only 0.3% and there is lots of catch up to do for Microsoft.
      Shoppers on Android, iOS and Symbian follow similar trends in time of shopping. However, while shopping on Android and iOS peak during the rush hours in the morning and afternoon, on the other hand, a large number of users on Symbian shop close to midnight.
      Women and men have quite different tendencies in products bought. Women’s top purchases include women’s clothing, shoes, bags, cosmetic and skincare, and mother and baby products; men’s purchases include men’s clothing, women’s clothing, and 3C products.
      Now, the average monthly spend for Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4. While the spend under 8 dollars went down from 27.2% to 19.7%, spend in the 8 dollars to 48 dollars range has shown steady growth throughout the year. The spend level is expected to grow along with the improvement of living standard and maturization of large payment on mobile phone.
      Concern for payment security is clearly indicated in payment method. 33.2% shoppers choose cash on delivery and 32.6% 3rd party payment such as Taobao’s Alipay. Only 13.2% choose online banking and 11.2% mobile payment. Less than 5% pay through China Mobile payment Easyown, and 2.4% through bank transfer.
      For delivery method, around 67% shoppers use privately-run courier services due to price advantage and speed of delivery, around 21% choose EMS, a service run by China Post for security and better coverage as it’s often the only option for delivery to remote regions in China.
      For users not choosing online shopping on mobile phone, the leading concerns are payment security, small screen that doesn’t provide good user-experience and slow network speed. Other concerns include, heard too many negative reviews, it’s troublesome to set up mobile payment, don’t have the right resources, worry about not good at using mobile online shopping, don’t know how to set up, don’t like online shopping, and don’t know smartphone can do online shopping.
      This video infographic is presented by Advangent — a digital link to your business in China. Visit us to find more at http://www.advangent.com. Thank you for watching.

      Chinese B2C E-Commerce driven by Luxury Goods and Social Commerce [preview for ‘Asia B2C E-Commerce Report 2013’ by yStats.com, Feb 5, 2013]

      The recent “China B2C E-Commerce Report 2013” by Hamburg-based secondary market research company yStats.com provides information about the Chinese B2C E-Commerce market. Aside from trends, it covers revenues, the share of B2C E-Commerce on total retail sales, product categories, Internet user and shopper data, as well as information about leading players in B2C E-Commerce in China.
      Chinese B2C E-Commerce expected to grow by approximately 30 Percent annually over the next Years
      B2C E-Commerce is gaining more and more ground in China. According to forecasts, it is expected to grow by more than 30 percent annually between 2010 and 2016. Overall, fashion, shoes and bags, as well as computers and household appliances are among the most popular product categories online. B2C E-Commerce with luxury goods is one of the leading trends. In recent years, this segment has grown more strongly than traditional B2C E-Commerce.
      A growing number of Chinese residents use social networks to purchase products online. Social Commerce is expected to become even more significant in China than in the USA. M-Commerce is also gaining in importance. Between 2011 and 2012, M-Commerce grew approximately fivefold and now accounts for more than four percent of total B2C E-Commerce sales.
      Amazon is only in fifth Place among Online Retailers in China
      Leading Chinese online retailers include Tmall [of Alibaba Group], 360buy, Tencent and Suning.com. Amazon is only in fifth place in China, with a market share of less than three percent. In 2011, Alibaba Group’s Tmall.com generated more than 100 billion CNY [$16.3 billion] in revenue, increasing its revenue by a three-digit growth rate. Some foreign companies also try to gain a foothold in the Chinese B2C E-Commerce market. In 2012, US company Toys’R‘Us opened its first online shop in China. However, online retailers face problems with the delivery of products ordered online. Consequently, retailers such as VANCL and 360buy are currently developing their own delivery solutions as shown in yStats.com’s “China B2C E-Commerce Report 2013”.
      B2C E-Commerce and M-Commerce in China are expected to continue growing by double- to triple-digit percentage figures. However, the share of Internet users who also make purchases online is still much lower than in other countries of the Asia-Pacific region such as Japan and Australia.

      Study on global B2C E-Commerce trends sees more personalization and increased use of mobile devices [yStats.com press release, April 11, 2013]

      A newly released study by the Hamburg based secondary research company yStats points to trends expected to affect the B2C E-Commerce market in the coming years. Online shopping is likely to become more personalized, with retailers customizing their services and integrating online sales channels such as websites and social networks on any device that will connect to the Internet. M-Commerce is expected to play an ever larger role in the future, with over half a billion customers following the trend to shop via mobile devices by 2016. Moreover, throughout the world, online shoppers are forecasted to increasingly prefer to pay online when buying over the Internet, causing the online and mobile payment markets to grow strongly, especially in Asia.
      Worldwide B2C E-Commerce growth will be led by large increases in the Asia-Pacific region
      As current trends continue, Asia-Pacific is expected to overtake North America as the region with the highest B2C E-Commerce sales in 2013 and to account for over a third of global B2C E-Commerce revenues. By 2016, the Asia-Pacific region’s share is likely to increase further, while the North America and Western Europe shares of world total B2C E-Commerce are expected to steadily erode. Still, in 2013 USA is projected to remain by far the largest B2C E-Commerce market worldwide. One of the major trends there is expected to be growth of M-Commerce, reflected in triple-digit growth rates of mobile payments in the years to 2016. The Asia-Pacific region’s growth is expected to be led by China, with the number of online shoppers there projected to reach almost 2.5 times the number in the USA by 2016. M-Commerce is gaining popularity in China as well, with mobile sales on total B2C E-Commerce sales projected to triple by 2015. The online sales of luxury goods such as health and beauty products, apparel and watches has led the recent surge in B2C E-Commerce in China. New delivery systems and payment methods are being implemented in that country as well, helping to tap into the great potential for online commerce.
      Intense growth foreseen in other nations
      The other BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia and India, are also projected to see their B2C E-Commerce markets boom in the coming years. In India B2C E-Commerce is expected to see intense growth as soon as the payment environment is improved, since the current cash-on-delivery method of payment is seen as a hindrance to growth. The growth of Russian B2C E-Commerce is driven by the increasing Internet audience, already the largest in Europe, and increased online sales are anticipated as the challenge of product fulfillment is overcome. In Brazil online shopping benefits from growing mobile Internet penetration and social commerce. In Mexico B2C E-Commerce is forecasted to grow at double-digit rates in the years to 2015, with online travel sales leading the market. Another emerging B2C E-Commerce market is Africa. Growing smartphone penetration, especially in South Africa, is expected to boost M-Commerce and mobile payment markets on the continent.
      Another trend influencing worldwide growth in online sales is the concept of group buying. In the Middle East particularly, group buying and daily deals websites have boosted B2C E-Commerce. Sales of Groupon in one nation in the region were so strong last year that the vendor could not keep up with the demand.
      Growth expected in travel and gaming sectors
      Among other trends highlighted in the yStats report, social media are forecasted to play an increasing role in the travel segment of the global B2C E-Commerce market, by helping customers research information for a trip. Moreover, the demand for travel arrangements adjusted for use on smartphones is likely to grow. Another market segment, online gambling, is expected to undergo a change in the years to 2015, with sports betting losing some of its share to lottery and casino.

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