South Korea’s IT exports topped $6.19 billion in July, up 30.8 percent from a year ago, despite external environmental factors such as high crude oil prices and hikes in U.S. interest rates. Exports of cellular phones rose to $1.95 billion last month, up 55.3 percent from a year ago, with exports of digital televisions increasing 12.8 percent to $130 million, thanks to a growing demand in the U.S. market coinciding with the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics.
Mobile phone giant Vodafone has reported the first ever drop in customers at its Japanese business, Vodafone KK. Net subscribers fell by 3,100 in July, the first such loss reported by one of Japan’s three main operators.
Sanyo Electric recently announced a new tuner IC that integrates an FM radio receiver circuit into a single chip. It is forecast that a radio tuner will be built into 30 percent of cell phones on sale in the market in the near future, with shipments of 500 million units per year expected, said an official of Sanyo Electric.
NEC has announced the development of a GPS-based golfer information service, whereby the locations of players on a golf course and their scores are displayed on a large screen or a PC monitor in realtime. The service will be tested in August at the NEC Karuizawa 72 Golf Tournament, where NEC’s NESPIT III positioning terminal, NEC Software Chubu’s realtime GPS, Scala’s InfoChannel3 broadband display solution, and NEC’s UNIVERGE IP8800 multilayer switches and UNIVERGE WL wireless LAN systems will be used for the test.
Toshiba Corp. today confirmed its continued innovation and leadership in the fast growing market for 1.8-inch hard-disk drives with the announcement of two new drives. The 60GB “MK6006GAH” achieves the highest capacity yet achieved in this increasingly important HDD format, while the 30GB “MK3006GAL” slims down drive thickness to only 5mm.
In 2004, global spending on 3G infrastructure equipment will rise to $8.8 billion, doubling the $4.4 billion spent in 2003, according to a report by market research firm iSuppli. The firm noted that as of June, 30 commercial WCDMA 3G networks and 12 commercial CDMA2000 1xEV-DO 3G networks were operating in Europe, Japan, South Korea, the United States, and South America. This will help boost overall global capital expenditures for wireless infrastructure to $29.9 billion in 2004, up 15.4 percent from $25.9 billion in 2003.
