THT Research - Weekly OEM/ODM Newsletter

The Latest News on Global IT Contract Manufacturing from www.THTresearch.com 

BRING ON THE ORDERS
 
SMIC to serve Samsung, Solomon
SMIC has received STN driver IC bumping orders from Samsung and from Solomon Systech. SMIC will fill the orders at its Chengdu, China chip testing and assembling plant, a JV with UTAC (Singapore).
 
PSC DRAM for Dell PCs
PSC has begun DDR 2 shipments to Dell. PSC now has a capacity of 85K 12-inch wafers/month but is increasing capacity and is expected to have 105K monthly capacity by year end.
 
Samsung SDI handset panels
Samsung SDI has issued handset panel orders of around 1M/month each with CMO and HannStar Display. The panels are a mix of 1.82- and 2- inches.
 
Avid sees huge MP3 SoC order from China
Avid Electronics has announced that its MP3 SoC shipments are expected to reach 1M units/month, up from 100K currently following new orders from a first tier MP3 maker "in China." Question is, is it a China MP3 maker or an int'l brand working in China?
 
ECS IPC board orders
ECS has recently won over 10 new IPC board orders, mostly from Taiwan IPC and system integrators, for POS and thin clients. ECS's IPC sales are dominated by China and Taiwan customers (70%).
 
Or not... TomTom ready to abandon Quanta??
Rumors are flying in Taiwan that TomTom International plans to withdraw a contract order with Quanta for its GO series GPS portable navigation device. TomTom is denying this, Quanta is certainly denying it, but the rumors about TomTom's dissatisfaction with Quanta won't go away.
 
 
CHINA
 
GM leads China auto market
Chinese consumers are buying cars like crazy (sales rose 50% in 1H06) and GM leads the market with 1.8M units sold in 1H06. GM has a JV with the state-owned Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corp. Following GM are Volkswagen, Chery Automobile, Beijing Hyundai Motor Co, Tianjin FAW Toyota Automobile Co, Tianjin-FAW Xiali Automobile Co, Geely Automobile Co, Guangzhou Honda Automobile Co and Dongfeng Peugeot Citroen Automobile Co. Imagine that -- a U.S. auto company leading the market (!?).
 
 
COMPANY NEWS AND INDUSTRY TRENDS
 
IBM, Chartered to support Synopsys
IBM and Chartered Semicon have both reached agreements with Synopsys Inc. under which Synopsis will port PHYs for USB 2.0, PCI Express, SATA, and XAUI protocols to the 65nm process technology developed by Chartered, IBM, Infineon Technologies and Samsung, and will port its DesignWare USB 2.0 nanoPHY to IBM and Chartered's 90-nm process node.
 
ECS to acquire Uniwill
ECS announced plans to acquire Uniwill Computer Corp through a share swap (1:2) on Dec 1 2006.
 
Vonage acquires crucial VoIP patents
Vonage Holdings Corp. has bought 3 VoIP patents from Digital Packet Licensing Inc. -- U.S. Patent Nos. 4,782,485, 5,018,136 and 5,444,707. The patents will be useful to Vonage in its VoIP violation suits with Spring and Verison. Digital Packet has licensing agreements with Motorola, Time Warner, and Qwest Communications over these patents and Vonage now acquires those agreements, establishing itself as the new god of VoIP (if it already wasn't).
 
WPI - best name, top distributor
Taiwan-based IC distributor WPI (hands down best named company in the world -- World Peace Industrial) has been appointed Asia distributor for Solomon Systech's LCD driver ICs. WPI is the world's biggest distributor for OEM manufacturers.
 
Toshiba licenses more Rambus patents
Rambus and Toshiba have signed a patent licensing agreement. Toshiba is licensing Rambus SDRAM and DDR SDRAM memory controller patents. Toshiba also licenses Rambus XDR memory solution, DDR2 interface cells, Flexio processor bus interface, and serial link interface designs for Advanced Backplane, Fibre Channel and PCI Express applications.
 
Globalization woes - BenQ cuts jobs in Munich
BenQ Mobile plans to cut 277 "formal jobs" and 250 contact jobs at its Munich headquarters by year-end. Most of the jobs being cut are in R&D. On a brighter note, BenQ has extended the contracts of the employees it acquired when it bought Siemens' mobile unit until the end of 2006 -- that's 1,900 workers who have received an absolutely amazing 6-month reprieve from BenQ's "streamline program." BenQ Mobile has been losing about US$3.1M per day since acquiring Siemens mobile division -- which is pretty much what happens when an OK company acquires a dying company...
 
LCD panel cooperation
Innolux Display, CPT, and HannStar Display have reached agreements to share LCD panel capacity. Innolux will share 19-inch widescreen capacity with CPT and Hannstar; CPT will share 17-inch panel capacity; HannStar will share 19-inch panels capacity. One big happy family.
 
Motech moves on from failed MEMC supply deal
Solar cell maker Motech Industries (Taiwan) has signed a three-year wafer supply contract with Renesola (China) for at least 80-megawatt peak (MWp). Motech is also talking to several European suppliers. This is all following the fall-through of discussions with MEMC Electronic Materials (US) for polysilicon supply, which forced Motech to reduce its 2006 output goal.
 

M & A
 
Tessera acquiring Digital Optics
Tessera Technologies Inc. has agreed to acquire Digital Optics Corp. for US$59.5M in cash. Digital Optics makes specialty lenses and optical sub-assemblies for semicon lithography and communications industries.
 
Audiocodes acquires Nuera Communications
Audiocodes has acquired VoIP infrastructure provider Nuera Communications for US$85M in cash.
 
 
SEMICON
 
Freescale goes with TSMC... and UMC
Freescale is hedging its bets on foundry services. It has recently qualified UMCs 65-nanometer process, but in 2H06 it plans to send MC-series communication and mixed signal-IC orders to TSMC. TSMC provides 65-nanometer process services to Altera and TI as well.