NEW DELHI, INDIA: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd, a leading global mobile phone provider, and Rovio Entertainment, announced their partnership to co-promote the launch of the much awaited version of the hugely popular Angry Birds game - the Angry Birds Space. The new version is available on Samsung’s GALAXY smartphones and the GALAXY Note, a new category of mobile device.
As part of the association, an exclusive Samsung GALAXY Note level will be provided in the new version. To enhance the gaming experience for the GALAXY users, an additional ‘Danger Zone’ has been included in the latest version.
The Danger Zone includes a special package of 30 challenging levels (normally available as an in-app purchase) and is available free to all Samsung GALAXY users from Samsung Apps store and the Android Market (level pack compatible above Android 2.1) for the next three months. This exclusive offer will be available starting today with the launch of the Angry Birds Space.
“Samsung GALAXY Note with its immersive viewing experience and a powerful processor offers an ultimate gaming experience to its users. We are sure that our consumers will thoroughly enjoy the new Angry Birds Space experience on their Galaxy Smartphones and the Galaxy Note,” states Ranjit Yadav, country head, Mobile & IT, Samsung Electronics India.
The new Angry Birds Space features new characters, one of which, the Lazer Bird – has been introduced by Samsung, and reflects the personality of Samsung GALAXY Note. The bird’s lazer vision resembles the best viewing experience on the high resolution smart screen and its lazer strike super power resembles the high performance of the device. New characters, including the Lazer Bird have unique superhero powers to help in their fight against the space pigs and bring their eggs safely back home.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Microsoft collaborates with Accelerators Morpheus and Accel in India to give startups a headstart
MUMBAI, INDIA: Microsoft Corp. (Pvt) Ltd. is collaborating with accelerators in India to help startups grow their business through the availability of its globalprogram, BizSpark Plus. BizSpark Plus – an extension of the successful BizSpark program - works through select incubators and accelerators to provide added value products and services to high potential startups.
In India, The Morpheus and Accel, as part of the Global Accelerator Network, are the appointed accelerators. Working with the accelerators, the program will offer each of their startups up to $60,000 of Windows Azure compute and storage over a 24-month period, at no cost.
Speaking at Microsoft Tech-Ed India 2012, an annual innovation showcase, Shekhar Kirani, founder member, Accel, said: "Our simple aim is to help Indian startups succeed. BizSpark Plus will allow us the chance to provide the entrepreneurs we work with even more valuable support and services. Access to technologies like Windows Azure and other software and services from Microsoft should provide an impetus to our companies in the race to scale and succeed."
The accelerator partners are appointed for their exceptional ability to impact their local markets, their influence in the entrepreneurial community and their proven success with early-stage startups.
Ludovic Ulrich, WW program manager for Microsoft BizSpark, said: “We have been very encouraged by the success of BizSpark in India, especially the overwhelming support we received from our network partners and the community in general. With BizSpark Plus, we are moving to the next exciting stage: working with entrepreneurs on the forefront of the cloud revolution. Windows Azure is a powerful, integrated platform, making it easy for startups to get their services up and running quickly with minimal overhead. Combined with the strengths that The Morpheus and Accel bring to the table, the program is designed to accelerate Indian entrepreneurial success.”
BizSpark Plus is a ‘by invitation only’ program, and a startup, in addition to being eligible for the foundational BizSpark program (developing software, less than three years old, privately held and making less than $1 million annually), must be nominated by the BizSpark Plus partner.
In India, The Morpheus and Accel, as part of the Global Accelerator Network, are the appointed accelerators. Working with the accelerators, the program will offer each of their startups up to $60,000 of Windows Azure compute and storage over a 24-month period, at no cost.
Speaking at Microsoft Tech-Ed India 2012, an annual innovation showcase, Shekhar Kirani, founder member, Accel, said: "Our simple aim is to help Indian startups succeed. BizSpark Plus will allow us the chance to provide the entrepreneurs we work with even more valuable support and services. Access to technologies like Windows Azure and other software and services from Microsoft should provide an impetus to our companies in the race to scale and succeed."
The accelerator partners are appointed for their exceptional ability to impact their local markets, their influence in the entrepreneurial community and their proven success with early-stage startups.
Ludovic Ulrich, WW program manager for Microsoft BizSpark, said: “We have been very encouraged by the success of BizSpark in India, especially the overwhelming support we received from our network partners and the community in general. With BizSpark Plus, we are moving to the next exciting stage: working with entrepreneurs on the forefront of the cloud revolution. Windows Azure is a powerful, integrated platform, making it easy for startups to get their services up and running quickly with minimal overhead. Combined with the strengths that The Morpheus and Accel bring to the table, the program is designed to accelerate Indian entrepreneurial success.”
BizSpark Plus is a ‘by invitation only’ program, and a startup, in addition to being eligible for the foundational BizSpark program (developing software, less than three years old, privately held and making less than $1 million annually), must be nominated by the BizSpark Plus partner.
NGINX chooses LeaseWeb as preferred infrastructure partner
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS & SAN FRANCISCO, USA: LeaseWeb, a leading hosting provider and open source web server developer NGINX announced that NGINX has named LeaseWeb as its preferred infrastructure partner. By bringing together the speed and flexibility of one the world’s top web server software with LeaseWeb’s first-class global infrastructure services, the two companies will further enhance the quality of their customers’ experience.
"A reliable and secure hosting environment with optimal uptime is very important to us. We are extremely impressed with LeaseWeb's infrastructure, performance and stability. This made selecting LeaseWeb as our preferred infrastructure partner a logical next step," said Andrew Alexeev, co-founder of NGINX.
Over 25 percent of the world’s top 1,000 high traffic websites use NGINX, making it the second most popular open source web server of the Internet. Among the companies using NGINX today are well-known online services such as Facebook, Dropbox, Groupon, WordPress and SourceForge. LeaseWeb, in turn, is one of the largest Internet infrastructure and hosting providers in Europe and the USA, serving many high-profile clients such as Kelkoo, Starbucks and Wikimedia.
The two companies started collaborating during the launch of LeaseWeb’s new Content Delivery Network (CDN) infrastructure. Utilizing NGINX products, LeaseWeb’s CDN enables its customers to serve web content more quickly and economically, wherever they are in the world. The combination of LeaseWeb’s high performance Internet services and NGINX’s unmatched speed and scalability ensures greater web infrastructure efficiency at affordable cost. Based on the success of the partnership and the state-of-the-art hosting solutions within a first-class network, NGINX chose LeaseWeb as its Preferred partner.
"NGINX was our first choice as a performance caching solution for our CDN. We now work closely together on the optimization of this cutting-edge service," said Robert van der Meulen, manager, Research and Product Development, LeaseWeb. "We are very proud to be named Preferred Infrastructure Partner based on our collaboration.”
"A reliable and secure hosting environment with optimal uptime is very important to us. We are extremely impressed with LeaseWeb's infrastructure, performance and stability. This made selecting LeaseWeb as our preferred infrastructure partner a logical next step," said Andrew Alexeev, co-founder of NGINX.
Over 25 percent of the world’s top 1,000 high traffic websites use NGINX, making it the second most popular open source web server of the Internet. Among the companies using NGINX today are well-known online services such as Facebook, Dropbox, Groupon, WordPress and SourceForge. LeaseWeb, in turn, is one of the largest Internet infrastructure and hosting providers in Europe and the USA, serving many high-profile clients such as Kelkoo, Starbucks and Wikimedia.
The two companies started collaborating during the launch of LeaseWeb’s new Content Delivery Network (CDN) infrastructure. Utilizing NGINX products, LeaseWeb’s CDN enables its customers to serve web content more quickly and economically, wherever they are in the world. The combination of LeaseWeb’s high performance Internet services and NGINX’s unmatched speed and scalability ensures greater web infrastructure efficiency at affordable cost. Based on the success of the partnership and the state-of-the-art hosting solutions within a first-class network, NGINX chose LeaseWeb as its Preferred partner.
"NGINX was our first choice as a performance caching solution for our CDN. We now work closely together on the optimization of this cutting-edge service," said Robert van der Meulen, manager, Research and Product Development, LeaseWeb. "We are very proud to be named Preferred Infrastructure Partner based on our collaboration.”
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Dow launches global R&D center for electronic materials
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA: The Dow Chemical Co. announced the inauguration of its Dow Seoul Technology Center, a global Research & Development (R&D) center with focus on technological advances in display technologies and semiconductor-related applications.
The Dow Seoul Technology Center is located in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi-do, a strategic and important location to serve semiconductor and display customers. The site is expected to employ approximately 300 people at capacity in a five-story building that spans total floor area of more than 23,700 square meters.
With the addition of the new R&D Center, Dow has invested more than USD$400 million in Korea over the last decade to establish advanced manufacturing sites for semiconductor, display and LED technologies, and to further new business development in the area of electronic materials.
“This investment makes sense. Dow provides best-in-class technologies to enable faster, smaller and more powerful electronics and Korea is a global leader in the electronics market. With our new R&D center, we can deliver even more solutions for the fast-growing electronics industry – better serving our customers in Korea, but worldwide as well,” said Jerome A. Peribere, executive VP of The Dow Chemical Co. and president and CEO of the Dow Advanced Materials Division.
Major areas of research and development at the Dow Seoul Technology Center include lithography, organic light-emitting diodes (OLED), display materials, and advanced chip packaging to support growth. The site will be the global hub for Dow’s OLED research, and Dow has also equipped the site with a Nikon 193 nm immersion scanner and 300 mm tool cluster, which makes Dow Electronic Materials the only photoresist supplier in the world with a 193i application and development facility in Korea.
Dow also has a 193nm dry scanner at its Cheonan, Korea facility and the combination of these investments enable Dow to significantly shorten both product development cycle times and manufacturing lead times to meet customers’ more advanced requirements.
“Dow now has the full spectrum of capabilities from sales to production to R&D,” said Dominic Yang, group VP of Dow Electronic Materials and country general manager of Dow Chemical Korea. “We are pleased that we can further pave the way for closer cooperation among Dow experts, customers and development partners.”
The Dow Seoul Technology Center is located in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi-do, a strategic and important location to serve semiconductor and display customers. The site is expected to employ approximately 300 people at capacity in a five-story building that spans total floor area of more than 23,700 square meters.
With the addition of the new R&D Center, Dow has invested more than USD$400 million in Korea over the last decade to establish advanced manufacturing sites for semiconductor, display and LED technologies, and to further new business development in the area of electronic materials.
“This investment makes sense. Dow provides best-in-class technologies to enable faster, smaller and more powerful electronics and Korea is a global leader in the electronics market. With our new R&D center, we can deliver even more solutions for the fast-growing electronics industry – better serving our customers in Korea, but worldwide as well,” said Jerome A. Peribere, executive VP of The Dow Chemical Co. and president and CEO of the Dow Advanced Materials Division.
Major areas of research and development at the Dow Seoul Technology Center include lithography, organic light-emitting diodes (OLED), display materials, and advanced chip packaging to support growth. The site will be the global hub for Dow’s OLED research, and Dow has also equipped the site with a Nikon 193 nm immersion scanner and 300 mm tool cluster, which makes Dow Electronic Materials the only photoresist supplier in the world with a 193i application and development facility in Korea.
Dow also has a 193nm dry scanner at its Cheonan, Korea facility and the combination of these investments enable Dow to significantly shorten both product development cycle times and manufacturing lead times to meet customers’ more advanced requirements.
“Dow now has the full spectrum of capabilities from sales to production to R&D,” said Dominic Yang, group VP of Dow Electronic Materials and country general manager of Dow Chemical Korea. “We are pleased that we can further pave the way for closer cooperation among Dow experts, customers and development partners.”
ICT led enterprise market likely to be Rs 38,400 crore business by 2014
NEW DELHI, INDIA: Managing cities the smart way to provide better and more efficient services to residents is emerging as a huge business opportunity with the rapid urbanisation of the country, ICT experts forecast.
This ICT led enterprise market is expected to be Rs 38,400 crore businesses by 2014 from the current size of Rs. 14,400 crores. Market size was doubling every three or four years, according to Bharat Exhibitions MD, Shashi Dharan, the organiser of the Enterprise India Summit that examined the building of smart cities and transforming the nation by transforming the cities. This emerging development is important as India’s urban population would be some 500 million that is about 45 per cent of the billion plus population of the country throwing up immense problems in housing, transportation, municipal services, health care and education among others.
Pune has become the first city in India to appoint a CIO, Dr. Anupam Saraph. This is an entirely new trend, experts say. “The purpose of the office is to create connections and collaborations in Pune that will result in shared information systems to continue to make Pune prosperous and highly liveable,” said Vijay Sethi, VP and CIO of Hero MotoCorp. Pointing out that urbanization is one of the biggest trends today, Sethi said that to “transform our nation we need to transform our cities by making them smarter.”
In the smart city as in a smart organisation ICT organises all services. “Residents are looking forward to cities becoming prosperous and liveable, efficient, predictable and secure,” Sethi said. Delhi traffic police sending traffic alerts via SMS was one of the several benefits that smart organisation of transport provides; others in that sector being common ticket for all public transport enabling passengers to choose the best possible mode in real time, with transport authorities informed about sending more buses in areas of stranded passengers and providing display system across the city to pass on relevant traffic information to commuters.
Similar smart organisation in education and health care stretches resources efficiently across the population. For instance smart organisation enables teachers, parents and students to track students progress át all times, Mr. Sethi pointed out.
Smart organisation of cities also enables information sharing between different public safety personnel like police, fire fighters, hospitals etc to coordinate their help in times of emergency, Sethi said by reducing response time of public safety officials, the city makes citizens feel safer in smart environment.
Entire solution technologies and devices were being provided by ZTE that has over 15 R&D centres all over the world and invests over 10 per cent of its revenue in this area, according to Zhang Wencheng, director, technical sales, ZTE India. This helped integrated working of the city smart system at a high level of efficiency. The firm had already been rated as number one globally in 2011, he pointed out. “The demand for enterprise solutions and products is increasing rapidly in India,” he said.
In the New Delhi Municipal Corp., 2000 acres covered under road and street survey project has place on the GIS platform every visible asset including trees, manholes, street lights etc through a unique coding system that combines IT and mobile phone, IT director of NDMC, O.P. Mishra revealed at the conference. Because of this there is offsite real time monitoring system OSRT in operation that every municipal activity was under constant monitoring leaving no room for ambiguity. Benefits include, for instance, “comprehensive and consolidated reporting tool allowing single point access to the status of cleanliness of individual bins as well as circles as a whole.” He gave an inside view of how the system was working in NDMC.
How enterprise management in health care was making this service affordable and efficient for the patients came out at the conference. Max Healthcare Institute CIO Dr. Neena Pahuja said that inter-department information exchange in a hospital group, systems integration, and communication among hospital stake holders enabled seamless experience to be delivered to patients. This lowered costs to both hospitals and patients. It also helped provide new care options and strategies and boosted business intelligence in healthcare.
With healthcare groups running multiple hospitals and clinics, IT and mobile communication was essential to deal with the sheer volume of patient information. said Dr. Pahuja. According to her, the enterprise system enabled information exchange between 35 direct patient care providers in just four days of stay, which graphically explained what the system did for efficient and seamless patient service at lower costs.
This ICT led enterprise market is expected to be Rs 38,400 crore businesses by 2014 from the current size of Rs. 14,400 crores. Market size was doubling every three or four years, according to Bharat Exhibitions MD, Shashi Dharan, the organiser of the Enterprise India Summit that examined the building of smart cities and transforming the nation by transforming the cities. This emerging development is important as India’s urban population would be some 500 million that is about 45 per cent of the billion plus population of the country throwing up immense problems in housing, transportation, municipal services, health care and education among others.
Pune has become the first city in India to appoint a CIO, Dr. Anupam Saraph. This is an entirely new trend, experts say. “The purpose of the office is to create connections and collaborations in Pune that will result in shared information systems to continue to make Pune prosperous and highly liveable,” said Vijay Sethi, VP and CIO of Hero MotoCorp. Pointing out that urbanization is one of the biggest trends today, Sethi said that to “transform our nation we need to transform our cities by making them smarter.”
In the smart city as in a smart organisation ICT organises all services. “Residents are looking forward to cities becoming prosperous and liveable, efficient, predictable and secure,” Sethi said. Delhi traffic police sending traffic alerts via SMS was one of the several benefits that smart organisation of transport provides; others in that sector being common ticket for all public transport enabling passengers to choose the best possible mode in real time, with transport authorities informed about sending more buses in areas of stranded passengers and providing display system across the city to pass on relevant traffic information to commuters.
Similar smart organisation in education and health care stretches resources efficiently across the population. For instance smart organisation enables teachers, parents and students to track students progress át all times, Mr. Sethi pointed out.
Smart organisation of cities also enables information sharing between different public safety personnel like police, fire fighters, hospitals etc to coordinate their help in times of emergency, Sethi said by reducing response time of public safety officials, the city makes citizens feel safer in smart environment.
Entire solution technologies and devices were being provided by ZTE that has over 15 R&D centres all over the world and invests over 10 per cent of its revenue in this area, according to Zhang Wencheng, director, technical sales, ZTE India. This helped integrated working of the city smart system at a high level of efficiency. The firm had already been rated as number one globally in 2011, he pointed out. “The demand for enterprise solutions and products is increasing rapidly in India,” he said.
In the New Delhi Municipal Corp., 2000 acres covered under road and street survey project has place on the GIS platform every visible asset including trees, manholes, street lights etc through a unique coding system that combines IT and mobile phone, IT director of NDMC, O.P. Mishra revealed at the conference. Because of this there is offsite real time monitoring system OSRT in operation that every municipal activity was under constant monitoring leaving no room for ambiguity. Benefits include, for instance, “comprehensive and consolidated reporting tool allowing single point access to the status of cleanliness of individual bins as well as circles as a whole.” He gave an inside view of how the system was working in NDMC.
How enterprise management in health care was making this service affordable and efficient for the patients came out at the conference. Max Healthcare Institute CIO Dr. Neena Pahuja said that inter-department information exchange in a hospital group, systems integration, and communication among hospital stake holders enabled seamless experience to be delivered to patients. This lowered costs to both hospitals and patients. It also helped provide new care options and strategies and boosted business intelligence in healthcare.
With healthcare groups running multiple hospitals and clinics, IT and mobile communication was essential to deal with the sheer volume of patient information. said Dr. Pahuja. According to her, the enterprise system enabled information exchange between 35 direct patient care providers in just four days of stay, which graphically explained what the system did for efficient and seamless patient service at lower costs.
LCD panel market shows resilience after Japanese earthquake
EL SEGUNDO, USA: Although some facilities operated by liquid crystal display (LCD) panel and component suppliers were impacted by the Japanese earthquake of 2011, it’s apparent one year later that the overall effect of the catastrophe on the market was minor, due to the country’s limited presence in the display business as well as a serendipitous overhang of inventory, according to the IHS iSuppli Display Materials & Systems.
“A decline in a major country’s market share and a buildup in excess inventory normally are regarded as unfavorable developments for a technology market,” said Sweta Dash, director of LCD research at IHS. “However, in the LCD market of 2011, Japan’s limited presence in the global supply chain—combined with excess stockpiles in the channel—helped soften the blow of the manufacturing disruptions caused by the disaster.”
Only 5 percent of large-sized LCD panel manufacturing capacity and just 18 percent of small- and medium-sized LCD manufacturing capacity was located in Japan in the third quarter. In comparison, Taiwan accounted for 40 percent of large-size capacity and 55 percent of small and medium. Because of this, disruptions to Japan’s manufacturing and shipments had only a minor impact on the global LCD market.
Inventory saves the day
Panasonic, Hitachi and NEC were the only three panel suppliers whose fabs were impacted because of their proximity to the earthquake’s epicenter, while Sharp’s eighth- and 10th-generation fabs were not impacted at all.
Meanwhile, although LCD component supply was affected, panel vendors already had four to eight weeks of inventory in stock, which helped to ride out shortages in supply. Before the quake there already had been an inventory buildup of panels and television sets in the channel, which also reduced any potential negative consequence due to supply disruptions.
For facilities that suffered minor impairment from the quake, production resumed by the end of March and April; other facilities that suffered more substantial damage resumed production by the May or June time frame. Some facilities also were impacted by power shortages or rolling blackouts due to the shortages, but by summer Japan had fewer rolling blackouts or power cuts.
Not made in Japan
Another factor that limited the impact of the earthquake was that Japan accounts for less than 10 percent of the world’s LCD TV production.
Among those companies with TV production facilities in Japan—Panasonic, Sony, Sharp and Toshiba—only Panasonic sources the majority of its LCD TV products from Japan. Sony, for its part, produces only a very small percentage of its TVs in the country.
Even before the disaster, most Japanese-branded manufacturers already had established production facilities outside the country in places like China, Malaysia, Brazil, Poland and Mexico, serving those regional markets or operating as outsourced original design manufacturers (ODMs).
For these reasons, the earthquake disaster in Japan had only a very minor impact on TV production restricted to some power outages, with the majority of Japanese TV assembly plants remaining unaffected by the disaster. Many Japanese TV manufacturers also have decided to increase their outsourcing of TV production to ODMs since then.
Components a bigger concern
On the LCD component side, the biggest concern related to worries about supplies of anisotropic conductive film (ACF) and indium tin oxide (ITO) materials—areas that Japanese suppliers dominate.
Hitachi and Sony Chemical, for instance, control 80 percent of ACF material supply. Fortunately, those suppliers were able to restart production by March.
In the case of ITO materials, JX Nippon, Mitsui and Tosoh together accounted for 80 percent of that market. JX Nippon’s facilities were impacted by the earthquake, but some production had resumed by April and full production was restored by June. Among suppliers with four to eight weeks of component inventories, very little impact was felt. And for many components, other suppliers also increased their production, helping to reduce the deleterious effect of the disaster.
Other component shortages—such as in bismaleimide-triazine-resin (BT resin), hard drives and batteries—also upset panel demand by impacting the production of notebooks, tablets or other consumer electronic products. For BT resin, Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Co. Inc. held a 50 percent share, while Hitachi Chemical had a 40 percent share of supply.
By April, one month after the tragedy, Mitsubishi Gas had recovered 25 percent. For its part, Hitachi Chemical resumed production on March 17, 2011, but power outage issues continued for some time, and a full recovery didn’t come until the second half of 2011. Meanwhile, other companies in Taiwan, South Korea and China geared up to develop BT resin materials in order to reduce the impact of the shortage.
Source: IHS iSuppli, USA.
“A decline in a major country’s market share and a buildup in excess inventory normally are regarded as unfavorable developments for a technology market,” said Sweta Dash, director of LCD research at IHS. “However, in the LCD market of 2011, Japan’s limited presence in the global supply chain—combined with excess stockpiles in the channel—helped soften the blow of the manufacturing disruptions caused by the disaster.”
Only 5 percent of large-sized LCD panel manufacturing capacity and just 18 percent of small- and medium-sized LCD manufacturing capacity was located in Japan in the third quarter. In comparison, Taiwan accounted for 40 percent of large-size capacity and 55 percent of small and medium. Because of this, disruptions to Japan’s manufacturing and shipments had only a minor impact on the global LCD market.
Inventory saves the day
Panasonic, Hitachi and NEC were the only three panel suppliers whose fabs were impacted because of their proximity to the earthquake’s epicenter, while Sharp’s eighth- and 10th-generation fabs were not impacted at all.
Meanwhile, although LCD component supply was affected, panel vendors already had four to eight weeks of inventory in stock, which helped to ride out shortages in supply. Before the quake there already had been an inventory buildup of panels and television sets in the channel, which also reduced any potential negative consequence due to supply disruptions.
For facilities that suffered minor impairment from the quake, production resumed by the end of March and April; other facilities that suffered more substantial damage resumed production by the May or June time frame. Some facilities also were impacted by power shortages or rolling blackouts due to the shortages, but by summer Japan had fewer rolling blackouts or power cuts.
Not made in Japan
Another factor that limited the impact of the earthquake was that Japan accounts for less than 10 percent of the world’s LCD TV production.
Among those companies with TV production facilities in Japan—Panasonic, Sony, Sharp and Toshiba—only Panasonic sources the majority of its LCD TV products from Japan. Sony, for its part, produces only a very small percentage of its TVs in the country.
Even before the disaster, most Japanese-branded manufacturers already had established production facilities outside the country in places like China, Malaysia, Brazil, Poland and Mexico, serving those regional markets or operating as outsourced original design manufacturers (ODMs).
For these reasons, the earthquake disaster in Japan had only a very minor impact on TV production restricted to some power outages, with the majority of Japanese TV assembly plants remaining unaffected by the disaster. Many Japanese TV manufacturers also have decided to increase their outsourcing of TV production to ODMs since then.
Components a bigger concern
On the LCD component side, the biggest concern related to worries about supplies of anisotropic conductive film (ACF) and indium tin oxide (ITO) materials—areas that Japanese suppliers dominate.
Hitachi and Sony Chemical, for instance, control 80 percent of ACF material supply. Fortunately, those suppliers were able to restart production by March.
In the case of ITO materials, JX Nippon, Mitsui and Tosoh together accounted for 80 percent of that market. JX Nippon’s facilities were impacted by the earthquake, but some production had resumed by April and full production was restored by June. Among suppliers with four to eight weeks of component inventories, very little impact was felt. And for many components, other suppliers also increased their production, helping to reduce the deleterious effect of the disaster.
Other component shortages—such as in bismaleimide-triazine-resin (BT resin), hard drives and batteries—also upset panel demand by impacting the production of notebooks, tablets or other consumer electronic products. For BT resin, Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Co. Inc. held a 50 percent share, while Hitachi Chemical had a 40 percent share of supply.
By April, one month after the tragedy, Mitsubishi Gas had recovered 25 percent. For its part, Hitachi Chemical resumed production on March 17, 2011, but power outage issues continued for some time, and a full recovery didn’t come until the second half of 2011. Meanwhile, other companies in Taiwan, South Korea and China geared up to develop BT resin materials in order to reduce the impact of the shortage.
Source: IHS iSuppli, USA.
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