Briefs	E-mail PagePrint Version

For the time being, Hewlett-Packard will keep the crown as the world's biggest spender on semiconductors, according to a recent report published by market researcher iSuppli. The Palo Alto-based high-tech company will reportedly shell out $14.5 billion in 2004, up 31% from the $11 billion it spent last year with HP is expected to spend $16.1 billion in 2005, it said. Expenditures among the top 160 original equipment manufacturers in 2004 will touch $167 billion, about 24% more than last year's $135 billion. The projected sum for 2005 is $184 billion. About 47% of chips will eventually land in Asia this year. HP competitor Dell will pay $13.4 billion for chips in 2004, about a third more than the $10.1 billion it spent the previous year, to retain the second position. But it will inch closer to HP by 2005, with its spending for next year expected to hit $15.6 billion. The largest spending growth came from Samsung, which topped IBM and Siemens to claim the fifth position among semiconductor buyers. Samsung, the report said, will spend $5.88 billion, up 36.1 percent from a year ago…

Semiconductor giant Intel Corp. has canceled a project to develop a chip for projection TVs and said it planned to focus its resources in other areas. The company's plans to develop a liquid on crystal silicon chip, or LCoS, were first unveiled in January during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In August, Intel said it would not be released by the end of the year, as originally announced. The cancellation came as the company was assessing its 2005 budget and analyzing its investment in the technology, said an Intel spokesman. LCoS competes against other new display technologies that have already invigorated the rear-projection TV market, most notably the digital light processing (DLP) chip pioneered by Texas Instruments Inc. Analysts said Intel's move into the market could have made big-screen TVs less expensive - much like what its microprocessors did for personal computers over the past 30 years.  In recent months, San Jose-headquartered Intel has made a number of changes in its product plans, including the cancellation of a 4-gigahertz Pentium 4 that had been scheduled to ship early next year. In May, it canceled work on a next-generation Pentium 4 so that it could focus on more promising technologies, and in June, a manufacturing glitch forced a small recall of chip sets, which handle communications between the processor and the rest of the system; and…

Early next year, India will roll out a national biotechnology policy to address regulatory and investment concerns and to spur growth of the nascent industry. The policy reportedly could encourage manufacturers to make biotechnology equipment rather than depend on imports and the government was planning more pacts with private entrepreneurs. Drawing on the second largest English-speaking scientific and skilled manpower pool after the US, Indian biotechnology companies in industry sub-sectors such areas as clinical trials and vaccines are posting strong growth. The Indian Association of Biotechnology-led Enterprises says Indian biotechnology industry revenues should cross the one-billion-dollar mark in the financial year ending March 31, 2005, after rising 39% in the previous 12 months.

Go back, or read the latest briefs:

TRADE

empty