Taiwan players losing advantage in tablet competition

Although global 7 inch tablet demand is expected to grow around 60-70% from 130-140 million units in 2012 to 230-240 million in 2013, surpassing notebook shipments, Taiwan may not be able to share the opportunity and is estimated to only grow 24.5% on year to around 120 million units in 2013, according to the Taiwan Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC).

Since entry-level tablet demand is rising quickly and China-based ODMs are already capable of handling production, while at the same time, Taiwan's manufacturing orders for products such as notebooks and digital still cameras (DSC) are declining due to tablets, Taiwan-based ODMs are gradually losing their dominance in the IT manufacturing industry.

Global tablet shipments are estimated to exceed 300 million in 2015, surpassing total shipments of PCs of all kinds.The sale of white-box tablets has been increasing rapidly. The level of difficulty in producing 10 inch tablets is lower than for other products such as notebooks and this allows China-based small- and medium-size ODM firms to gain manufacturing experience. In addition, China-based ODM firms have been able to produce in smaller quantities while still being cost effective, which is ideal for the tablet market. This allows China-based ODM firms to obtain orders from brands. Market rumors indicate that some tablet ODM orders from brands such as ViewSonic and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have shifted to China-based firms recently.dsaDE3D

Early last week, well before Computex kicked off, we heard murmurings about a Foxconn and Mozilla partnership working to produce not another smartphone, but a tablet featuring Mozilla’s mobile OS. Now we can see that Reuter’s Taipei-based source leak was correct. A few generic looking prototype tablets were on show at Computex at the Mozilla booth alongside Geeksphone and Alactel smartphones.

MobileGeeks published a video showing a few angles of Mozilla’s new tablet working and playing some kind of demo showreel. The bubbly Mobile Geeks presenter told us that the tablets on show at Mozilla’s booth were for eyes only and were not to be prodded or tried out by Computex attendees.

The specifications of the tablets on show at the Mozilla booth were not shown. Mozilla and Foxconn said they were working on at least five devices together. However at this time we don’t know of what hardware will be inside this Foxconn made 8 inch tablet or what brand it will be sold under.About one in 10 Canadian tablet owners now considers their mobile device to be their primary computer, suggests a new online survey conducted globally.

The research by Ipsos also suggests Canadians may be a little less enamoured with their tablets than users worldwide.When averaging out the responses collected in 24 countries, almost 20 per cent of tablet owners said they counted on that device to do most of their computing, compared to 11 per cent of tablet owners in Canada. About 41 per cent of tablet users in Saudi Arabia, 38 per cent in China and 30 per cent in India preferred using a tablet over a desktop or laptop computer.

Among Canadians, women, those under 35 years old, and consumers in the Prairies and Quebec were most likely to consider their tablets for sale.The Canadian results are based on polls with 1,000 adults in January.The polling industry's professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.

According to another study released earlier this year, tablet ownership is spiking in Canada.A report by the Media Technology Monitor suggested 28 per cent of anglophone Canadians owned a tablet as of last fall, up from 12 per cent a year earlier.About 60 per cent of those tablet owners had an iPad and almost 20 per cent had an Android device.