Asia's Tech News, Weekly: July 17th 2024

Samsung chips, China space issues, Vietnam digital economy, Malaysia's Silicon Island, Bangladesh-Huawei digi-banking, Aus Gov tech audit, deepfakes & Asia-Pac, semiconductor investments...

• South Korea: Samsung secures a 2-nanometer AI chip foundry and package order from Japan's Preferred Networks Inc AI applications developer

• India's Tier-2 & Tier-3 cities' semiconductor opportunity: ""...expenses up to 30% lower than in Tier-1 cities, including employee salaries, real estate, and administrative costs."

• South Korea's Samsung steps up competition with Taiwan's TSMC and others, unveiling plans for one-stop AI chip production solutions for clients, claiming a 20% cut in delivery times

• Available now: Q2 2024 Space Investment Quarterly, looking at activity and space industry trends, from Space Capital

• China: 7th launch of iSpace Hyperbola-1 solid-fuel rocket fails, dropping successful-launch record to just 3 out of 7

• 'Generative AI and the future of work: A Singapore perspective' - McKinsey & Co

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'The mobile app economy is now a $1/2TN market, with nearly $1.5BN in spending each day in 2023 across app store spend and mobile ad spend [and] $362BN in mobile ad spend, an 8% YoY increase.'

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• China: HongShan Capital, formerly Sequoia Capital China, has reportedly established a new $2.5BN tech investment fund, backed by city gov't and private and state-owned insurance firms

• Vietnam: As part of 'Building for Vietnam's AI Future' initiative, Google is to roll out 40,000 scholarships for AI skills

• India and Bangladesh partner on emerging tech including civil nuclear and space, and development of a small satellite for Bangladesh for launch via Indian vehicle

• Vietnam: Digital economy projected to grow by a factor of 11 by 2030, reaching near half the country's current GDP and generating $220BN in value, says Google, with AI set to be a key driver

• Malaysia: A brief overview of the goals of the Silicon Island project, man-made recovered island off Penang, projecting 220,000 tech jobs over 30 years

Singapore FinTech Festival 2024

• Digital twins tech in semiconductors & integrated circuits: "One of the most compelling arguments for digital twins is its potential to replace costly wafer runs with software runs."

• China: Hozon EV firm preps for Hong Kong IPO, looking at funding to launch export of Neta electric cars into global markets

• New Zealand: Dosh applies to become NZ's first locally-owned digital-only bank

• China: 'A distributed denial-of-service attack affected, among others, the websites of Macau's security service, police, fire and rescue services, and the academy for public security forces'

• Japan: Toshiba partners Rohm Co semiconductor manufacturer for $636M investment over 3 years, looking at chips for EV power control and industrial devices

• Bangladesh: Nagad Digital Bank builds on achieving digital banking license with Huawei partnership, aiming to further develop tech for financial products and services

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Asia-Pacific: "...Vietnam had the highest increase in deepfake fraud in the region (25.3%) followed by Japan (23.4%) and the Philippines saw the highest growth in deepfake cases (4500%)."

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• Australia: E-waste processing startup, Sircel, secures $5M, in part to boost solar panel processing, likely to become one of the largest e-waste streams

• Malaysia: "...$5.33BN to transform the nation into a global semiconductor hub... develop an integrated circuit design park in Selangor and a 'Silicon Island' off the coast of Penang"

• Australian Space Week is set for July 22-26, alongside the 17th Australian Space Forum, featuring showcases, seminars, networking and more

• South Korea: MegaZoneCloud targets IPO at $7BN valuation, leveraging major cloud services provider position with firms including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure

• India's L&T engineering and infra conglomerate acquires Bengaluru's SiliConch Systems, a fabless semiconductor design company, fast-tracking L&T's chips presence

• South Korea: Poen secures $28M Series B with remanufacture of EV waste batteries

• Japan: Semiconductor makers including Sony, Mitsubishi and Toshiba planning near $31BN in capital investments to 2029, boosting production of power devices and image sensors

• China's Xpeng EVs maker unveils plans for cheaper mass-market brand, responding to fierce domestic EV competition, seeing HK share price rise in response

• Australia: A quick look at 4 startups which between them raised over $20M in the week to July 12th

• South Korea: A look at Samsung's challenges around AI-focused chips, with competitors gaining ground in supplying HBM - high-bandwidth memory - semiconductors to NVIDIA

• Japan to help Philippines with 5G as alternative to Chinese tech for Indo-Pacific infrastructure, building on Palau and Cambodia initiatives, potentially later adding Indonesia and Vietnam

• Australia: A comprehensive audit of all internet-facing tech used by Commonwealth agencies is to take place in light of concerns over foreign interference and foreign influence

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"For Chinese undersea cable maker Wuhan FiberHome International Technologies, being banned by the U.S. government is nothing to worry about. It has, in fact, been good for business."

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• Philippines: Packworks, B2B marketplace and service provider to small 'sari-sari' stores, gains $60K Dept of Science & Tech grant to explore AI and ML use in inventory and marketing

• Australian Competition & Consumer Commission and the Treasury Department to develop obligatory anti-scam code to ensure that 'net companies safeguard consumers

• Malaysia: Hong Kong FinTech Week's Southeast Asia Roadshow hits Kuala Lumpur on July 29th - register here

• Hong Kong arm of China Pacific Insurance Group partners Swiss crypto bank, AMINA Group, with both leveraging crypto investment advisory, on/off-ramping, trading and custodial services

• Semiconductor funding, globally, in Q2 of 2024 saw 91 startups raise $2.6 billion - here's a breakdown of companies and categories

• South Korea's S2W: "There are between 500,000 to 1 million active sites accessible on the dark web, and we are the only ones in South Korea with the technology to detect newly created sites."

McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2024

• Japan's Softbank Group has acquired UK's AI chip accelerator firm, Graphcore

• India's Zypp Electric secures $15M funding led by Japan's ENEOS energy conglomerate with goal of taking electric vehicle rental services to wider SE Asia markets

• Australia: Jigspace maintains growth with new $4.4M fundraise, looking to further develop augmented reality services

• Indonesia's Rize, a tech firm helping rice farmers adopt new methods which cut emissions while boosting yields and profits

• Download: 'Combating Disinformation - An Agenda for US-Japan Cooperation' from the Center for Strategic and International Studies

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NVIDIA's lead in design & development: "This little-known NVIDIA programme is backing 4,500 European startups... and over 17,000 around the world..."

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• Vietnam: New Law on Telecommunications eliminates restrictions on foreign ownership of data and cloud service providers

• Philippines: An overview of moves to digitize the sari-sari stores economy, a sector through which near 70% of manufactured goods are distributed

• Download: 'Anchoring the Bay of Bengal in a Free and Open Indo-Pacific' from India's Observer Research Foundation, and Global Policy Journal

• Vietnam: Nami Distributed Energy lands $10M from Singapore's Clime Capital with rooftop solar and on-site energy solutions for commercial and industrial customers

• Cambodia: A brief overview of data collected by the government's Startup Cambodia initiative, outlining the successes and growth of the Kingdom's startup ecosystem

• China: "Average vacancy rates at logistics properties in east and north China are approaching 20%, the highest in years... More warehouses are being built, which is making the problem worse."

• Indonesia: Discovery/Shift consultancy launches DSLaunchpad AI incubator, a 6-week programme for startups in machine learning, robotics, computer vision and similar fields

• An overview of the recent Japan-ASEAN Startup Business Matching Fair 2024 which showcased more than 60 startups from 6 countries, and the new ASEAN LINK business growth service

• Australia: Charges laid against individual who ran a fake Wi-Fi access point during a domestic flight, capturing personal data and credentials from other travelers

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Mobile apps: "The app economy is just over 15 years old... is set to generate $2.2 trillion over the decade between 2021 and 2030."

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• SEMICON Taiwan conference and expo is set for September 4-6, looking at all things in microelectronics and with a theme focus on artificial intelligence

• Australia: Xccelerate24 program from x15ventures, venture-build arm of CommBank, opens applications for Australian AI and data startups

• Japan: 2025 OIST Innovation Accelerator applications are open, from Okinawa Institute of Science & Tech

• Japan: Global Pitch Competition is set for October 9 & 10 in Fukuoka City, with startup applications closing August 19th

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In wider-world technology news:

» "Italy is gearing up for a major role in European semiconductor production with... plans to invest around €10 billion ($10.7 billion) in the sector this year."

» 'European Deeptech - Opportunities and discoveries, an investment perspective' from McKinsey & Co

» UAE's Polynome Group has announced a $100M fund for AI startups, with investments to commence in Q1 2025

» Google moves to block ads for e-commerce sites using Polyfill service following the domain being acquired and modified by China-based criminals, affecting 110,000 sites

» "Investments by venture capitalists and others into crypto businesses rose to $3.2bn in the second quarter of this year, the highest amount for a three-month period since 2022..."

» WhatsApp messaging app moves to add voice message transcription capability, allowing the app to 'listen' to messages and output them as text for reading

» "...gen AI could enable fraud losses to reach US$40 billion in the United States by 2027, from US$12.3 billion in 2023, a compound annual growth rate of 32%."

» The UK's Spiralis Energy, trialling a 3D-printed Archimedes screw to generate power from tidal movement, featuring components made from recycled plastics

» IonQ, a US quantum computing firm, raised $55M in round led by funds backed by Samsung and United Arab Emirates government, with unique room-temperature quantum tech

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"Tokenized financial assets are moving from pilot to at-scale deployment... not yet widespread but financial institutions with blockchain capabilities in place will have a strategic advantage"

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