MIC said that in the high-tech industries, IoT (Internet of Things) has become the mainstream, meanwhile, the new economy driven by internet innovative services is taking shape.

"The market demand derived from IoT applications has thus become a new battlefield to bring about changes in the industry landscape and technology trends, which are believed to be the highlights in 2017," says Vic Chou, the Director of MIC.

MIC noted that upon entering the age of IoT, the cross-border competition has become more intense as the market boundaries have become blurrier. For those with a relatively large customer base, they have adopted more aggressive M&A strategies to secure their dominance.

In addition, under the demand-driven trends in the age of IoT, standard products are no longer able to meet market demands. For this reason, the high-tech industries have begun to forge alliances, establish standards, and build ecosystems. The differences between various alliances in terms of standards remain significant and uniting them all together in the short run is virtually impossible. Therefore, some have shifted to develop board-level kits to customize standard products and services with new development process in order to lure more developers and eventually expand industry ecosystems.

As for the Artificial Intelligence, MIC said AI technology has become increasingly popular in recent years. Hence, International brands such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM have made aggressive move to share their platform resources so as to speed up the development of applications across sectors. Ultimately, they aim to capture a greater share of the market and secure their market dominance.

And the red hot AR/VR, MIC said that VR software is yet to reach maturity, there are still a number of VR brands rushing into this area. Google and Microsoft have stepped into and are likely to be major players in the software/hardware and platform development of Mobile VR and PC VR to help the market be more price-friendly and widespread.

Meanwhile, some vendors in Taiwan have expanded their investments in VR. For instance, Taiwanese HTC has developed a new wireless transmission technology to boost VR development.