Business News
Taiwan's 2006 IT hardware output to hit 85 billion US dollars
By DPA
May 3, 2007, 14:47 GMT

Taipei - Taiwan maintained its leading role in the production of information technology (IT) hardware last year with production value up 11 per cent, an industry report said Thursday.

According to the Market Intelligence Centre (MIC), the combined shipment value for eight major IT hardware products is expected to hit 85.6 billion US dollars, up 11 per cent from 2005's 77 billion dollars.

Shipment value will receive a powerful boost from growth of notebook PCs and liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors, which are expected respectively to grow 17.9 and 5.1 per cent to 35.8 billion and 20.5 billion US dollars, the report said.

Other product categories such as servers and desktop PCs are projected to grow 9 to 11 per cent, while digital still cameras are anticipated to climb 26.2 per cent.

During 2006, gains in many of the product categories will come from value-line models and emerging markets as the industry's mainstream shipments are based on mature technology, the MIC report said.

This is likely to intensify Taiwan's dominance of global IT hardware industry volume, but will bring with it inevitable price declines.

To ward off the deleterious effect on shipment value, Taiwanese makers are continuing to work toward higher value-added products, improved innovation competencies and worldwide logistics integration, as well as product design and marketing based on consumer behaviour trends.

In 2005, combined shipment value for the eight IT hardware products totaled 77 billion US dollars, up 10.5 per cent from 2004.

Notebook PCs and LCD monitors were once again the major force behind the growth in 2005. In terms of share of global supply in 2005, Taiwanese makers were collectively the largest world's producers of notebook PCs (82.4 per cent), motherboards (98.3 per cent), LCD Monitor (71.7 per cent) and CDT Monitor (53.4 per cent) by volume.

Taiwanese share of global supply for optical disk drives, digital still cameras and servers reached 40.1 per cent, 41.8 per cent and 34.5 per cent respectively, aggregately accounting for the second- largest volume of any nation in each product category.