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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BillyG who wrote (28139)	1/15/1998 9:58:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Lots of MPEG chips flowing out of Tiawan.................................. nikkeibp.com John H Isacs, Taipei CD-ROM Drive Market Jumps 40%, MPEG Chips Boom Taiwan continues to manufacture and market worldwide a variety of multimedia products ranging from chips to finished systems. Popular Taiwan multimedia products include CD-ROM drives, sound and video cards, speakers, etc. Increasingly, Taiwan companies are focusing on multimedia software and systems solutions. Over the first half of 1997, despite large fluctuations in the price of key components and general industry volatility, the multimedia segment of the electronics and information technology industries continued to grow from 15 to 22% annually. Selected segments of the multimedia industry grew at an even more rapid rate. According to the China External Trade and Development Council, the national production value of compact disk read only memory (CD-ROM) drives is projected to grow at a rate of nearly 40% in 1997 to approximately US$700 million. A new product that is also expected to experience high growth rates in the Taiwan multimedia industry is digital video disk (DVD)-ROM. Taiwan is the world's fourth largest manufacturer of semiconductors, trailing only the US, Japan and Korea. Chips for multimedia applications have become an important segment of this industry. One company benefiting from its leadership in Taiwan's multimedia industry is Winbond Electronics Corp. Winbond is Taiwan's fourth largest semiconductor company with 1996 revenues of US$430 million. Jack Chang, director of multimedia business, comments on Winbond's multimedia business. "In the PC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)-1 add-on card application, Winbond has been dominating the market with lion share of 70% or more. Since 1994 when Winbond launched the W9910IF/20IF solution, more than 1.5 million sets have been sold, mostly in Asia. We plan to extend the strength we've had in MPEG-1 to PC MPEG-2 and its DVD applications. We will market these new products worldwide." Another company benefiting from strategic positioning in the multimedia components industry is Macronix International Co Ltd, Taiwan's seventh largest semiconductor company with 1996 revenues of US$373 million. The company's major customers include Sony Corp, Nintendo Co Ltd, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, all of Japan, and Apple Computer Inc of the US. Taiwan's PC companies produce a variety of multimedia computers ranging from portable notebooks to high-end workstations. Gordan Hsieh, director of ILNet and a leading industry analyst, comments, "Its fair to say that multimedia computers with CD-ROMs are now a mainstream product. More and more multimedia technology is being crammed into locally made computers. This is facilitated by the fact that many of the multimedia components are now produced in Taiwan. For example, Taiwan is the world's largest manufacturer of graphic cards and local IC companies turn out new multimedia chips every quarter."