This week, Jian Li-feng delivered a speech on this topic and pointed out that today’s consumers tend to buy hardware products with built-in Internet functions. Consequently, all big name manufacturers need Taiwan’s hardware manufactures as partners in order to mass-produce networking chips.

Jian Li-feng said, “Hardware manufacturing has never been as important as this in the past.”

He predicted that this year the global number of people with Internet access will reach a new high of three billion people, and this will bring about an increase in the amount of hardware device shipments. This will also help to develop related hardware manufacturing in Taiwan. At the same time, he refuted the belief that hardware manufacturing is a “thing of the past.”

Jian Li-feng emphasized that this is currently the era with the greatest demand for hardware manufacturing in history. Taiwan is home to the world’s finest supply chains and production, and Silicon Valley companies are currently actively coming to Taiwan in search of partners to further develop the integration of hardware and software. This will allow for more new opportunities for OEM manufacturing in Taiwan.

He also stated that during the past PC era, each year the global amount of hardware manufacturing related to PCs was in the hundred’s of millions of units, and for smartphones this could be calculated in the billions. However, in the Internet of Things era, devices that can access the Internet will increase twenty-fold to two-hundred-fold to reach over tens of billions of units sold yearly.

According to units of analysis research, the global business opportunities brought about by cloud in 2015 are expected to exceed US$ 120 billion. Furthermore, with the expanding increase in the scope of businesses and progress in establishing standards, Taiwanese companies, such as TSMC, Delta Electronics, and MediaTek will have strong earnings.