Carbon Chemist

Tag: Taiwan

  • India Could Be Apple and Samsung’s Solution to the Future of Phones

    India Could Be Apple and Samsung’s Solution to the Future of Phones

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    Vivo represented 15.8 percent of the Indian phone market in the third quarter of 2024 according to IDC, comfortably overtaking Samsung. It’s no newcomer, either. Vivo was India’s third-place brand as far back as 2018, according to Canalys.

    It has produced some great phones and pushed the envelope in phone camera tech in particular, claiming firsts for the use of a gimbal sensor stabilization in 2020’s Vivo X50 Pro and, later on, pixel shift in the Vivo X60 series.

    If you are among those who have not encountered a Vivo phone before, you might assume it’s a local brand, an Indian one. It isn’t. Vivo is from the BBK group of phone manufacturers, alongside Oppo, OnePlus, Realme, and others. These are all Chinese companies, under a parent company large enough to cast a Lovecraftian shadow. These Chinese brands are responsible for shaping where the Indian phone market is in 2024.

    “Because of cheap data and the entry of the Chinese brands into India over the past seven, eight years, [Chinese manufacturers] really democratized the price points,” says Singh.

    A decade or more ago, trade shows were packed with feature phones made for developing markets like India. Feature phone dominance has been flipped, and India is now entering a stage where, just like the West, the public is more accepting of and more able to buy higher-priced phones.

    “’Value for money’ has been the common psyche of an Indian consumer, but it is shifting swiftly towards buying more premium phones,” says Neil Shah, vice president at CounterPoint Research. “The phone has become central to every user, with a higher ROI than even buying a car, house, or insurance. Consumers are seeing smartphones as more of an investment opportunity.” A phone, in India, can at times be everything.”

    The data backs that up. According to Counterpoint, the average sale price of a smartphone in India has risen from $192 in Q3 2020 to $293 in the same quarter in 2024.

    It is this effect that has helped Apple perform so well in India, with an almost 60 percent reported increase in market share from Q3 2023 to 2024, according to IDC figures.

    “Considering that the average selling price of Apple is so high, it’s an achievement that Apple has done well in the past few years,” says Singh. “One of the major reasons is Apple is seen as an aspirational brand in India. It has a brand halo. Everybody would love to buy an iPhone. Not everybody can afford one.”

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  • How battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts

    How battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts

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    Gogoro is not the only company working on battery-swapping for electric scooters (New York City recently launched a pilot program to give delivery drivers the option to charge this way), but it’s certainly one of the most successful. Founded in 2011, the firm has a network of over 12,500 stations across Taiwan and boasts over 600,000 monthly subscribers who pay to swap batteries in and out when required. Each station is roughly the size of two vending machines and can hold around 30 scooter batteries.

    Now the company is putting the battery network to another use: Gogoro has been working with Enel X, an Italian company, to incorporate the stations into a virtual power plant (VPP) system that helps the Taiwanese grid stay more resilient in emergencies like April’s earthquake. 

    Battery-swap stations work well for VPP programs because they offer so much more flexibility than charging at home, where an electric-bike owner usually has just one or two batteries and thus must charge immediately after one runs out. With dozens of batteries in a single station as a demand buffer, Gogoro can choose when it charges them—for instance, doing so at night when there’s less power demand and it’s cheaper. In the meantime, the batteries can give power back to the grid when it is stressed—hence the comparison to power plants.

    “What is beautiful is that the stations’ economic interest is aligned with the grid—the [battery-swap companies] have the incentive to time their charges during the low utilization period, paying the low electricity price, while feeding electricity back to the grid during peak period, enjoying a higher price,” says S. Alex Yang, a professor of management science at London Business School. 

    Gogoro is uniquely positioned to become a vital part of the VPP network because “there’s a constant load in energy, and then at the same time, we’re on standby that we can either stop taking or giving back [power] to the grid to provide stability,” Horace Luke, cofounder and CEO of Gogoro, tells MIT Technology Review. 

    Luke estimates that only 10% of Gogoro batteries are actually on the road powering scooters at any given time, so the rest, sitting on the racks waiting for customers to pick up, become a valuable resource that can be utilized by the grid. 

    Today, out of the 2,500 Gogoro locations, over 1,000 are part of the VPP program. Gogoro promises that the system will automatically detect emergencies and, in response, immediately lower its consumption by a certain total amount.

    Which stations get included in the VPP depends on where they are and how much capacity they have. A smaller station right outside a metro stop—meaning high demand and low supply—probably can’t afford to stop charging during an emergency because riders could come looking for a battery soon. But a megastation with 120 batteries in a residential area is probably safe to stop charging batteries for a while.

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  • Threads is giving Taiwanese users a safe space to talk about politics

    Threads is giving Taiwanese users a safe space to talk about politics

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    3. The US government is considering cutting the so-called de minimis exemption from import duties, which makes it cheap for Temu and Shein to send packages to the US. But lots of US companies also benefit from the exemption now. (The Information $)

    4. The Chinese commerce minister will visit Europe soon to plead his country’s case amid the European Commission’s investigation into Chinese electric vehicles. (Reuters $)

    5. After three years of unsuccessful competition with WhatsApp, ByteDance’s messaging app designed for the African market finally shut down last month. (Rest of World)

    6. The rapid progress of AI makes it seem less necessary to learn a foreign language. But there are still things AI loses in translation. (The Atlantic $)

    7. This is the incredible story of a Chinese man who takes his piano to play outdoors at places of public grief: in front of the covid quarantine barriers in Wuhan, at the epicenter of an earthquake, on a river that submerged villages. And he plays the same song—the only song he knows, composed by the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. (NPR)

    Lost in translation

    With Netflix’s March release of The Three Body Problem, a series adapted from the global hit sci-fi novel by Chinese author Liu Cixin, Western audiences are also learning about a movie-like real-life drama behind the adaptation. In 2021, the Chinese publication Caixin first investigated the mysterious death of Lin Qi, a successful businessman who bought the movie rights to the book. In 2017, he hired Xu Yao, a prominent attorney, to work on legal affairs and government relations.

    In December 2020, Lin died after he was poisoned by a mysterious mix of toxins. According to Caixin, Xu is a fan of the TV series Breaking Bad and had his own plant in Shanghai where he made poisons. He would order hundreds of different toxins through the dark web, mix them, and use them on pets to experiment. A week before Lin’s death, Xu gave him a bottle of pills that were supposedly prebiotics, but he had replaced them with poison. 

    Xu was arrested soon after Lin died, and he was sentenced to death on March 22 this year.

    One more thing

    Taobao, China’s leading e-commerce platform, announced it’s experimenting with delivering packages by rockets. Yes, rockets. Made by a Chinese startup, Taobao’s pilot rockets will be able to deliver something as big as a car or a truck, and the rockets can be reused for the next delivery. To be honest, I still can’t believe this wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.

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  • Why Threads is suddenly popular in Taiwan

    Why Threads is suddenly popular in Taiwan

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    Still, Threads’ popularity plummeted after its launch in July 2023. In Taiwan—like the rest of the world—many users left the platform after satisfying their initial curiosity. 

    But the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election gave it another chance. Wang, who studies social media in Taiwan, traced the platform’s second rise to November of last year, starting with the supporters of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), often associated with the color green. “Many (worried) pan-green supporters noticed that their complaints on politics were promoted to more readers on Threads than any other social media platforms (especially Facebook and Instagram), so more and more pan-green supporters gathered to Threads and used it as a mobilization tool,” he says.

    The election concluded in mid-January, with DPP candidate Lai Ching-te elected as Taiwan’s president. Many supporters of his party stayed on the platform. And as it became influential, other political figures also reactivated their Threads accounts and started posting regularly, trying to join the conversation. Everyday users who are less interested in politics came along too.

    On almost every day of the past three months, Threads has been the most downloaded social network app in both Apple’s and Android’s app stores in Taiwan, according to Sensor Tower, an app store intelligence firm. It surpassed both Western social platforms and those popular in China. 

    What does Taiwan Threads look like?

    Wang, who has been actively posting on Threads and accumulated over 3,000 followers, observes that there are two major demographics among Taiwan’s Threads users today: the pro-green voters, and younger students who are still in middle school and high school. “In recent weeks, there is a considerable amount of discussion on how to choose colleges, majors, and even high schools,” he says.

    Since Threads doesn’t have an official name in Chinese, Taiwanese users have tried to translate it in creative ways. Some stay close to the meaning and call it 串 or chuan, which means a string of beads or other objects (it could also mean a kebab skewer). Others call it 脆 or cui, which means crispy or fragile. It’s a transliteration attempt that many feel is too far-fetched, but since there’s no sound like “th” in Mandarin, it’s the best alternative, and it has already caught on among the users and surpassed other names. 

    What defines the content on Threads is a mix of political and lifestyle posts. On the one hand, some of the most influential accounts are Taiwanese politicians at all levels, including the presidential candidates. On the other, Threads users have embraced a type of content called 廢文—a cross between trash talk and light-stakes monologue. 

    As a result, to gain a following on Threads, the best practice is to mix up the serious and the unserious. One local representative candidate became unexpectedly famous when people discovered that his son was physically attractive. Joking about how this son’s virality has eclipsed his own, the politician now calls himself “The father of the son of Phoenix Cheng” on Threads, where he has over 268,000 followers.

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