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The world's second largest IT exhibition, COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2004, closed on June 5th, 2004. According to statistics by the organizers, the number of professional international visitors who came to visit during the five days of the event totaled to be 26,222, representing a growth of 17.85% from last year and the number also broke the record high number in 2002. In addition, total number of domestic visitors for COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2004 is 82,602; these numbers have set a new record as well. According to the visitor origin analysis, top five countries where international visitors come from are the U.S.A. (3,856 people), Japan (3,335 people), Hong Kong (1,822 people), Korea (1,656 people), and Singapore (895 people) respectively. Other major countries include Germany, Mainland China, Malaysia, Austria, India, Thailand, Indonesia, and Canada.
COMPUTEX TAIPEI is organized by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) and the Taipei Computer Association (TCA), and this year, COMPUTEX TAIPEI is stepping into its 24th year. Recently, scale of the exhibition has been expanding continuously; this year, COMPUTEX TAIPEI's venue expanded into 4 exhibition halls, including Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC) Hall 1, Hall 2, Hall 3 and the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC).
This year, there are 1,347 exhibitors in total, occupying 2,828 booths; net exhibition space has grown 16.9% as compared to last year and COMPUTEX TAIPEI is now the second largest professional IT exhibition in terms of the number of exhibitors, following CeBIT Hannover.
As a result of the success of COMPUTEX TAIPEI, demand for exhibition space has far exceeded that available at the Taipei World Trade Center, and in order to provide sufficient exhibition space for all the exhibitors, organizers of COMPUTEX TAIPEI had tried their best making the most use of the space available. COMPUTEX TAIPEI exhibition is getting bigger and stronger each year and by August of 2006, the new construction structure: Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center will be available for exhibition. By that time, not only the exhibition space shortage problem of COMPUTEX TAIPEI can be solved, the service quality of other exhibitions in Taipei will also be elevated.
This year, many well-recognized names had joined COMPUTEX TAIPEI; some domestic companies including Acer, Arima, ASUS, BenQ, CMC, Elite, FIC, Foxconn, Gigabyte, Micro-Star, Mitac, RITEK, Sampo, Tatung, TECO, and VIA. International companies participated at COMPUTEX TAIPEI include AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments.
As the slogan of COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2004 "Future Perfect!" suggests, most products exhibited this year emphasize on the perfect integration of IT products into daily life. New products launched at COMPUTEX TAIPEI mostly fall into the categories of "Digital Home," "Wireless Environment," "Internet Applications" and "Audio Visual Quality." In addition, most products' exterior design are trendier and more user-friendly, very different from the cold, hard impression IT products used to have, and the product functionality and design are even closer to users' practical needs.
Mr. Stan Shih, Chairman of the Acer Group, who is about to retire this year, is invited to join the opening ceremony and give a speech on the topic of "The Personal Computer for the Digital Home:Challenges and Opportunities". Mr. Shih points out that in the post-PC era, it is still a debate whether Digital Home should be centered around a PC or TV. These years, with continuous improvements on multimedia hardware and software, personal computers are also developed to be easy to use. Therefore, digital home products are not only the hope for household electronic appliance companies, but also providing PC manufacturers opportunities to expand their business. Mr. Shih said, digital home products are mostly connected through wireless LAN and they must possess such characteristics such as easy to use, high reliability, and common context. In addition, after-sales-service is also a very important factor. Therefore, facing these challenges, household appliance manufacturers must also improve their management culture as well.
Throughout the exhibition halls, it is obvious to see Taiwan PC companies' strategic branding promotions. Participating COMPUTEX TAIPEI for the first time, well-known IT products OEM company, Foxconn, actively promotes its own brand "Foxconn" products, competing with companies such as Acer and ASUS through the international medium COMPUTEX TAIPEI provides.
Looking around the exhibition halls, it is easy to see other product development trends of domestic companies. First, it is the all-in-one multi-function trend; for example, the Bluetooth wireless headset from FIC is the integration of Bluetooth, MP3 player, and headset. Second, it is the idea of being more environmentally friendly; for example, the rechargeable wireless optical mouse from KYE Systems, which includes four batteries so that users can cut down the costs spent on batteries and also solve the problem of environment pollution. Next, it is the critical criteria in digital home, the friendly human-machine interface; for example, the WLAN chipset from Realtek has integrated in it a friendly human-machine interface supporting zero configurations. Another example would be the digital home software product, PowerCinema 3, from Cyberlink, which emphasizes its advantages of easy connection to other home entertainment devices for view audio or video files without complex TCP/IP network setup.
In addition, other innovations among exhibitors' products include overcome product's cooling and layout difficulties, demonstrating to the world that besides manufacturing, Taiwan can also design products of high specifications that have never been in the market before.
Visitors who have visited the four halls indicate that most of the exhibitors at COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2004 have furnished and decorated their booths to best represent themselves, and besides key component manufacturers, such as Intel, AMD and National Semiconductor, who have taken this opportunity to launch their newest products, other innovative products can also be seen at the show. Procurements made at COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2004 will definitely be worth it! In addition, visitors are all very positive about the organizers' attitude and their attempt to continuously improve the exhibition and related services quality.
Next year, COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2005 will be on May 31st ~ June 4th, 2005.
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