Sumner Lemon

China may be one of the fastest growing markets for telecommunication services, but large parts of the country saw a precipitous drop in the number of new users as well as lower revenue and widening losses during the first quarter, according to China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII).

When China United Telecommunications Corp. (China Unicom) announced the commercial launch of its nationwide CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) service in January, Qualcomm Corp.

Advanced Micro Devices announced the first laptops based on its mobile Athlon XP processor will begin shipping early next month in Europe and Japan. Availability of the notebooks in the U.S. was not announced.

After months of protracted negotiations, the Taiwanese government announced March 28 long-awaited plans to ease restrictions on Taiwanese chip companies that want to invest in semiconductor manufacturing facilities in mainland China.

Computer-hardware maker Acer Inc. has taken its first step towards building an Internet-based service business with the announcement of a package of services aimed at small companies in Taiwan.

IBM Corp. has narrowly squeezed past rival Sun Microsystems Inc. to become the world's top Unix server vendor for the first time since 1998, market research group IDC said Friday.

With RDRAM (Rambus Dynamic RAM) now firmly established as a niche memory product, DDR SDRAM (Double Data Rate Synchronous DRAM) is set to become the most commonly used PC memory this year, with shipments of DDR chips soon to exceed those of low-end SDRAM chips.

Companies in the U.S. and elsewhere that are looking for offshore IT outsourcing services should keep an eye on China, according to a research note published by Gartner Inc.