Taiwan is looking to become a major worldwide supplier of automotive telematics devices through cooperation with China, said Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Huang Chung-chiou.

Huang said although the world automobile industry has been seriously hit by the current economic recession, China's automobile production is forecast to reach 6.5 million to 7.5 million units this year to meet its huge domestic demand.
China is emerging as a major automobile consumption and production market, alongside the United States and Europe, driven by its efforts in recent years to achieve rapid growth in this sector, Huang noted at the forum, which was organized by the Institute for Information Industry and the Industrial Technology Research Institute.

In 2007, the total production volume of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in Taiwan was 37.73 million, with a production value of $177.05 billion, according to statistics quoted by Huang. Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) accounted for more than 70 percent of the total, with a delivery volume of more than 29 million, he said. The production volume of PNDs is forecast to reach 80 million in 2012, he added.

Roughly 175 million GPS-enabled handsets were manufactured in Taiwan in 2007, and the figure is expected to reach 560 million in 2012, which indicates that Taiwan has become an important supplier of telematics products, he said.

In order to focus more on the development of telematics in the automobile industry, the cost of electronic systems in vehicles would be adjusted from 19 percent to 40 percent of the total cost of automobile production in the future, Huang said.

As telematics companies in both Taiwan and China are specialists in their respective fields, it would be mutually beneficial to the two sides to pool their resources in order to become major suppliers of telematics devices, he suggested.

Source: E-Taiwan News