Sunday, June 24, 2012

Apple's Patent Aggressiveness Hurts Taiwan's Economy?

Clean air today, good for photography...

The rabidly pro-China WantChinaTimes argues that Apple hurts Taiwan....
Significantly, Taiwan's exports to the United States and Europe in May declined 12.3% and 13.4%, respectively. Meanwhile, its exports of consumer electronics to these two regions were down 53.7% and 41.1% year-on-year, respectively.

The sharp fall in Taiwan's exports of electronics was attributed to large declines in the Taoyuan-based HTC's exports of smartphones to the United States and Europe.

According to media reports, HTC contributed one quarter of Taiwan's export growth in 2010. Therefore, declines in its exports to the United States and Europe negatively affected exports and even income and employment growth.

Apple can be called the culprit behind the decline in HTC's — and hence Taiwan's — exports. To achieve its goal of profit maximization, Apple filed patent infringement lawsuits around the world against major manufacturers of Android mobile phones and tablet computers, including Samsung and HTC, and demanded that other countries ban the import of products that violate patents.

HTC's exports declined sharply due to its failure in these lawsuits, though it had commanded a large market share in the United States, which has grown over the past few years.
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2 comments:

StefanMuc said...

Well Apple's main target was Samsung, and they've managed to increase their market share regardless.

The fundamental problem there is the product lineup, they need to compete with Samsung's high-end phones. Also the locked-down bootloader may have been a bad choice. They lost support of the Geeks, while Samsung hired the chief-developer of CyanogenMod. Of course the actual number of phones sold to Geeks is not that high, but those are people who tend to influence discussions about gadgets, no point alienating them.

Sean said...

That is not really the case. Bootloaders are no longer locked in HTC phones, that only happened for a very short period to only a small number of models and it was a while back. HTC reverted that within two months after geeks complained.

Samsung is still the lousiest in releasing updates for its phones and has the buggiest roms in the market but they do have the biggest advertising budget. Case in point, Samsung only now released ICS updates when JB is already out. Samsung is almost always over half a year late or never bothers - for instance it took them a year to release 1.6 for the original Galaxy when everyone else was already on 2.0. Meanwhile HTC is far more proactive.

Htc s biggest issue was too many product lines which they are reducing, better build quality but ugly designs, and a comparative ad budget the size of a peanut.