NEWS

On November 14th, hisense electric Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Hisense”), a listed company of Hisense Group, and Toshiba Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Toshiba”) jointly announced that Hisense acquired Toshiba TV for 12.9 billion yen. This transaction reflects the decline of Japanese household appliances and the rise of domestic household appliances. Not only Hisense, but also domestic enterprises including Gree, TCL and Haier have shown increasing strength in the global market.

Hisense and Toshiba announced that 95% of the shares of Toshiba Visual Solutions Corporation (hereinafter referred to as “TVs”) have been officially transferred to Hisense. After the transfer, Hisense will enjoy a package of services such as Toshiba TV products, brands and operation services, and have the global brand authorization of Toshiba TV for 40 years. The amount of the equity transfer is tentatively set at 12.9 billion yen, and the delivery is expected to be completed by the end of February 2018.

In the past two years, Hisense has accelerated the strategic deployment of the global market: in 2015, Hisense hosted the “Sharp” North American TV business, continuously sponsored the world’s top sports events such as the 2016 European Cup and the 2018 World Cup, and vigorously promoted the internationalization strategy.

Wu Chunyong, CEO of Convergence Network, believes that Hisense’s acquisition of Toshiba TV has many values. First of all, although the operation of TVS Company is very depressed, its main business is Toshiba TV and various peripheral products (including commercial monitors and advertising monitors), and it has an excellent R&D team in Japan, which has accumulated profound technical foundation in TV image quality, chips and audio, and Hisense has gained personnel and technology from this, which are valuable assets. “In terms of market share, Toshiba’s TV sales in 2016 still ranked in the top three (IHS) in the Japanese market, which can be said not to be underestimated. Hisense can also further enter the Japanese market and have more room for growth. ” Wu Chunyong said.

In the past two years, Toshiba has been selling assets to save its performance. In March 2016, Midea and Toshiba reached a memorandum of understanding on the acquisition of their white goods business, and Midea acquired a controlling stake in Toshiba’s white goods business through acquisition; In December of the same year, Canon announced the completion of the acquisition process of Toshiba Medical System, with an acquisition amount of 665.5 billion yen; At the end of September this year, Toshiba officially announced that it would sell its memory chip business to Bain Capital Consortium for 2 trillion yen.

Due to the drag of Westinghouse Electric, its American nuclear energy business company, Toshiba’s financial situation continues to deteriorate. Toshiba said in a statement that the company’s net loss for the fiscal year ended March 31 this year was 965.7 billion yen. This is lower than the average analyst’s estimated net loss of 977.4 billion yen. Toshiba expects that the company will return to net profit in the fiscal year ending next March. However, last month, Toshiba said that after calculating the taxes related to the sale of chips, it is expected that the net loss will be nearly $1 billion this fiscal year. In fact, not only Toshiba, but also Japanese electronic consumer companies have not had a good life in recent years.

Liang Zhenpeng, an analyst in the home appliance industry, pointed out that most Japanese companies have problems such as bloated structure, too long decision-making chain, low operating efficiency and slow response to civilian terminal consumption, and they are not sure about the trend of intelligence, internet and IT in the home appliance industry, and the home appliance business of Japanese companies has been unable to keep up with the pace of the overall market.

Speed up internationalization

In recent years, with the decline of Japanese household appliances, more and more domestic household appliance enterprises have accelerated the internationalization process, which can be seen from the corporate financial report.

Taking TCL as an example, the report of TCL Group in the third quarter of 2017 shows that the overseas market of TCL TV continues to grow and its competitive advantage is obvious. Sales in overseas markets increased by 29.5% year-on-year, among which sales in North America increased by 97.4% year-on-year. In August, the market share in North America increased significantly from 10.4% in June to 16.3%, ranking third in the market. It is understood that in the future, TCL will accelerate its business in Europe, the United States and Southeast Asia, as well as India, Brazil and Russia.

The overseas expansion of domestic household appliances is not only the possession of sales volume and market share, but also the internationalization of China household appliances enterprises, which has also experienced the transformation from “OEM” to independent brands. In the past, domestic home appliance enterprises were mostly OEM, without their own core technologies and independent brands. This weakness also made them encounter many setbacks in the process of globalization.

“In the early days of overseas development, although we exported a lot, we mainly produced OEM products for foreign brands. Now’ going out’ are all our own brands. I think this is the biggest change for Gree.” In the view of Dong Mingzhu, the chairman of Gree Electric, although “OEM” has a large sales volume, it is tantamount to making wedding clothes for others, and it is an inevitable choice to build its own brand.

Forward-looking Industry Research Institute pointed out that the global household appliances pattern is constantly changing, and the rise of household appliances in China has become unstoppable. However, in the future international competition, we may not only face the competition of foreign brands, but also the cruel competition of domestic counterparts.

Chip God said in an interview that Apple can’t live without Israel.

In an interview with Calcalist recently, Johny Srouji, Senior Vice President of Hardware Technology, talked about Israel’s contribution to Apple products, Face ID security and AR. Srouji’s team in charge of Apple is responsible for customizing chips and hardware technologies such as batteries, memory controllers and application processors (including A11 bionic).

Srouji first praised Israel’s contribution to Apple products, and he himself was born and raised in Israel. He mentioned that Apple now has more than 900 engineers in Israel, compared with 700 in 2015.

A few years ago, Apple set up an R&D office in Haifa, north of Tel Aviv. At that time, this facility was Apple’s second largest R&D institution outside the United States.

There, there are a group of engineers devoted to chip design, testing and manufacturing.

Srouji mentioned that every apple product in the world is inseparable from the work we have done in Israel. He also said that the Israeli team is part of this excellent and perfect long-term vision, so we will continue.

Over the years, Apple has acquired several Israeli companies, including PrimeSense, which developed the original Kinect sensor for Xbox. PrimeSense’s 3D sensing technology is considered as the core technology of iPhone X’s Face ID.

Later, Apple also acquired LinX, an Israeli startup, whose dual camera technology is likely to be used on the latest iPhone models. Apple also acquired Israeli flash memory chip company Anobit Technologies and facial recognition startup RealFace.

Then in the interview, Srouji talked about Face ID, which he called “the fastest and safest facial recognition system in the industry”. Srouji also talked about ARKit, Apple’s latest augmented reality platform. He mentioned that Apple has always looked at chip design with a forward-looking view, and Apple’s three-year roadmap has been planned to 2020.

NI technology improves the safety and reliability test of ADAS and self-driving cars

NI (National Instruments) recently announced the launch of Vehicle Radar Test System, VRTS). VRTS can be used to test the 76-81 GHz radar technology from R&D laboratory to mass production, from single radar sensor to integrated advanced driver assistance system (ADAS). Customers can purchase VRTS from NI’s selected alliance partners, who provide users with advanced system integration and support services.

Yishi and XMOS announced a partnership to make Yishi AI conference assistant have leading far-field voice technology.

XMOS Company announced today that its VocalFusionTM voice technology has been selected by Shenzhen eMeet Technology Co., Ltd. for its smart mobile conference treasure eMeet OfficeCore M1. This commercial solution is the first product of this cooperation and can now be purchased from online retail stores.

Keep pace with the times, escort Lyme Electronics with stunning appearance at the 14th China International Modern Railway Technology and Equipment Exhibition.

Recently, the 14th China International Modern Railway Technology and Equipment Exhibition, known as the “First Exhibition of Asian Railways”, was grandly opened in Shanghai Exhibition Center recently. The market leader in the field of electricity sensors and Lyme Electronics, a provider of high-quality electricity measurement solutions, joined hands with many special products of the railway industry to make a stunning appearance, attracting many visitors to stop and consult.

NI introduces automation solutions to turn complex Big Analog Data™ into valuable technical insights.

NI (National Instruments) recently released the Data Management Software Suite. This enterprise software solution provides a complete workflow to standardize the measurement data of different teams, mine data to obtain useful information, transform data through automatic analysis, and finally provide reports with technical insight value.

Midea Micro brought the most advanced optimized NVIDIA GPU system to SC17.

Super Microcomputer, Inc. today demonstrated the GPU server platform supporting NVIDIA Tesla V100 PCI-E and V100 SXM2 GPU accelerators at the 2017 Global Supercomputing Conference (SC17). SC17 was held at the Colorado Convention Center on November 13th-16th, and the booth number of Midea Micro was 1611.

Pinjia Group of United University of Science and Technology launched a Bluetooth audio solution based on Microchip technology.

Dalian United University Holdings announced that its Pinjia is pushing for a Bluetooth audio solution based on Microchip)IS2064GM, which uses Microchip private protocol to connect one master device with multiple slave devices. In this scheme, the master device can be connected to a Bluetooth streaming device (such as a mobile phone), and can also receive the LINE—IN input and forward it to one or more slave devices at the same time. The scheme also supports Bluetooth RF CLASS 1, and the maximum distance can reach 100 meters.

ERS introduces cutting-edge innovation in the field of semiconductor heat dissipation test.

ERS electronic GmbH announced that its product line for semiconductor industry has made great innovations, which greatly improved the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of users.

The latest series of AirCool® PRIME thermal chucks developed in cooperation with MPI Corporation brings outstanding flexibility and the fastest transition time in the industry. With this achievement, the system has greatly improved the test throughput of customers. Moreover, the system has the largest hot zone in the market, which brings unparalleled flexibility to various semiconductor testing applications.

Microchip introduced a new 8-bit single chip microcomputer, which integrated peripherals independent of the kernel, shortening the response time of key system events in CAN network.

Microchip Technology Inc recently announced that two 8-bit MCU products have been added to PIC18 series product lines. These single-chip computers combine CAN bus with a large number of peripherals (CIP) independent of the kernel, which not only enhances the system functions, but also enables designers to develop applications based on CAN more easily without adding complicated software.

Synaptics AudioSmart USB-C codec won the first THX certification in the industry.

Synaptics today announced that its AudioSmart® CX21988-THX has become the industry’s first USB-C voice codec solution with THX certification. By providing THX-certified USB-C voice codec, Synaptics® can provide important building blocks for OEMs, and bring great advantages to the development of THX-certified headphones, headsets, mobile game devices and other personal voice devices. THX was founded by filmmaker George Lucas in 1983 to provide internationally recognized certification for products that do not compromise on quality, compatibility and performance.

E-League announced that Metcal welding platform will adopt Connection Validation™ technology to monitor the quality of welding points and trace the welding process.

E-League recently announced the off-the-shelf supply of Metcal CV-5200 welding table, which is the first device in the world equipped with Metcal’s patented Connection Validation™ technology, and can provide real-time closed-loop feedback on the formation of intermetallic compounds: this is a key index for evaluating the quality of welding points.

In Q3 2017, global tablet PC shipments reached 45 million, and three of the top five manufacturers achieved double-digit growth.

According to a recent research report released by Strategy Analytics, in Q3 of 2017, global tablet PC shipments increased by 2% from the previous quarter to 45 million. Apple held the first place with 23% of the global tablet market share, while Samsung fell to 13%. Huawei has performed well, and tablet shipments have achieved positive year-on-year growth for four consecutive years. The report Q3 2017 Global Tablet Shipments and Market Share released by Strategy Analytics Tablet & Touch Screen Strategy (TTS) service points out what factors are driving these results and how industry players can recover from the weak market.

Ames Semiconductor and Ningbo Shunyu Optoelectronic Information Co., Ltd. reached a cooperation.

Ames Semiconductor Corporation (ams AG) announced today that it has reached a cooperation with Ningbo Shunyu Optoelectronic Information Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Shunyu Optical Technology (Group) Co., Ltd. Ames Semiconductor will join hands with this leading integrated optical equipment manufacturer and optical imaging system solution provider to develop and sell 3D sensing imaging solutions for mobile devices and automotive applications for OEMs in China and other parts of the world.

Farewell to cable bondage: HTC pushes “Vive Focus” single VR device

In order to let everyone enjoy virtual reality content freely, HTC has just released a single VR headset that is not bound by cables. It is Vive Focus. Compared with competing products, its biggest feature is that it does not need to use mobile phones. HTC chose Qualcomm Xiaolong 835 VR platform for Vive Focus, equipped with a high-resolution AMOLED display, and claimed that it was the first such device to provide “6DoF”. In addition, Focus uses an open platform called “Wave VR” and has access to Viveport VR content.

Huawei cooperates with Gemalto to speed up deployment of NB IoT.

Gemalto and Huawei, through its semiconductor subsidiary hisilicon, jointly develop a new generation module with higher security performance and extremely low power consumption, aiming at meeting the growing demand of equipment manufacturers for durable low-power narrowband (NB) IoT modules. This NB-IoT module combines the profound expertise of the two companies, which can help manufacturers reduce equipment costs, reduce equipment size and extend the service life of equipment batteries by 10 years.

Bowers & Wilkins’ brand-new 700 series speakers play in Shanghai

Recently, Bowers & Wilkins, the legendary creator of the ultimate soundtrack, released a brand-new 700-series speaker, which perfectly combined the studio-level acoustic technology with the classic box design, and presented music lovers with an auditory experience that they could enjoy the studio-level ultimate soundtrack at home. At the same time, Bowers & Wilkins’ Shanghai Ganghui Plaza store was redesigned, and its opening ceremony was held in the new site on the sixth floor of Ganghui Plaza on November 10th, bringing fans a more excellent tasting experience with a new look. Mr. Yan Huanquan, Senior Vice President of Bowers & Wilkins Greater China, presented an “Extreme Soundtrack Appreciation Meeting” for the guests, shared the wonderful stories behind the legendary brand, and led the guests to experience the new 700 series speakers.