The tech giant has reportedly held meetings with entities involved with the Pyeongtaek project including the municipal office of the city to discuss the supply of public utilities for the new factory by fixing the schedule of its operation in March 2020.

The operation of the new plant, valued at 30 trillion won ($26.4 billion), was widely expected by industry watchers to begin in June of 2020.

But the plan seems to be have been moved forward to March next year despite current slow market conditions.

The chipmaker might be moving more quickly in preparation of a market recovery next year so that it can take an advantageous position in terms of pricing when demand goes up.

“Samsung seems to be preparing for recovery of demand for memory chips next year,” said an industry official.

“And the new fab will be used probably for the most high-tech DRAM chips that will go into high-spec digital devices like foldable smartphones.”

The world’s top memory chip provider broke ground for the second fabrication facility for memory chips next to its first plant that is already the single largest memory fab in the world. The entire Samsung memory complex in Pyeongtaek measures in at 2.89 million square meters, |about the size of 400 football stadiums.

Samsung is planning to build two more memory fabs within the complex, and plans for the next construction are also likely to be announced soon.

Last week, the company reached an agreement with residents of nearby cities spanning from West Anseong to Godeok to build electricity pylons that will provide up to 2000 megawatts of power for the semiconductor production facilities.

The construction of the towers was strongly objected residents who had claimed that such high voltage transmission towers could pose a threat to their health.

“Although prices of DRAM and NAND flash chips experienced fall in the first quarter, Samsung didn’t scale down its investment plans,” the official said. “Senior company officials are predicting the demand will pick up in the second half of this year and continue to rise rapidly next year.”

“The upcoming memory plant will play a key role in striking a balance between supply and demand, and Samsung will be wanting to take the lead,” he added.

According to Samsung, it had initially set a rough timeline for the new fab to begin operations in March next year, a Samsung public relations official said, which had not been made public until recently.

“It’s not been officially announced because the schedule could be adjusted in accordance with market conditions,” the official |said.

“The timetable was set early last year when the company broke ground for the second plant, but the market is now totally different.”

The students graduated from the Apple Developer Academy.

“What I can say regarding the apps introduced by the graduates of the Apple Developer Academy is pride,” said Airlangga in Tangerang, Banten.

According to Antara, the minister said he was optimistic that the 166 students who were at the graduation ceremony would contribute to the development of the electronic and telematics industry in Indonesia.

Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson, said the applications presented by the students were very inspiring. She added the students at the academy, which is in Jakarta, really inspired her.

The two selected apps are called Helian and Khairan.

Helian is a shareable medical record app designed for giving care at retirement homes.

It will help caregivers track daily activities, set reminders and share patients’ important statuses with fellow caregivers when needed.

Meanwhile, Khairan is an app to help the community of visually impaired Muslims to identify kiblah when they are going to pray.

During the occasion, the students also introduced other apps, such as Koda, for instance, that helps jobseekers practice interviews in Indonesian. The app will give feedback on the speed of speech, eye contacts and sound.

There is also an app named Nadi that helps to find a matching blood donor in emergency situations.

Meanwhile, Talo connects travellers with limited time to experts at the destination for unusual cultural experiences and other adventures.

Last but not least, an app named Ainun helps the visually impaired to identify rupiah bills, and it is developed to become an app for everyone to identify fake money using additional UV light.

The laboratory will be the world’s leading research facility to advance the integration of AI into the design of products and services.

Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, witnessed the signing of the memorandum by Philip Chan, interim president and provost of PolyU, and Paul Thompson, vice-chancellor of the RCA.

The laboratory will address industry demands for efficiency, automation and customising products and services, and its research deliverables will support industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality and retail services.

 The two institutions will carry out an empirical research in affective computing and social robots that could recognise and analyse human emotions. They will also innovate materials of the future that are extremely light, robust and able to detect human biometrics for fashion and wearables and create automatic systems for ergonomic design and human modelling.

Chan says the laboratory will bring together the strengths of both institutions to lead the world in this new design paradigm, contributing to the innovation and technology development in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

Thompson says the world will witness breakthroughs across design and technology at the turn of the fourth revolution.

The RCA has built its capacity to work across disciplines, combining its art and design research expertise with insights from science, technology and engineering.

Experts said the current rounds of cutbacks and personnel reshuffle underscored a “return to rationality” of the thriving sector and a shift of focus from business model innovation to hardcore breakthroughs in China’s tech realm.

Didi Chuxing, the country’s top ride-hailing firm, said last month that it plans to eliminate 2,000 jobs, or 15 per cent of its workforce to focus on core services and limit internal costs.

Close on the heels of that came reports that e-commerce behemoth JD was planning to lay off 10 percent of its executives above the vice-president level.

At the same time, the company said its new recruits include 15,000 front line staff and managers in the logistics and retail subgroups.

“It is clear that the explosive growth of China’s internet sector, or even the mobile internet sector, has drawn to an end,” said Cao Lei, director of China E-Commerce Research Centre.

According to the centre, over 30 high-profile internet firms, including big-names like Meituan Dianping and LeEco, have confirmed, or are rumoured to have started layoffs.

Cao attributed the trend to the downward pressure of the macro economy, the consequent capital shortage, as well as the relatively high cost of acquiring a new user in a market where internet penetration rate is already high.

“Companies have no choice but to scale down businesses and hold back certain expansion plans to survive,” Cao said.

The string of layoffs would not come as a surprise especially given that certain so-called tech unicorns are yet to find their appropriate business models, said Xia Yang, founding partner of Xinyuan Investment Management Consulting Co Ltd.

Cash-burning campaigns

“A genuinely healthy enterprise is one that can thrive without going public.

“This is clearly not the case with companies like Didi, which bank largely on cash-burning campaigns to dominate the market and have failed to chart a sustainable profitability path,” Xia said.

Since late last year, there has been a call for rationality in investment in the internet sector and the aspirations to achieve “hardcore” technological breakthroughs are clearly on the rise, he said.

“The overemphasis on financial returns led to a neglect of how capital should bolster the real economy and develop more fundamental technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain,” he said.

“So the ‘return to rationality’ of both business owners and their investors might not be such a bad thing in the long haul,” said Xia.

Sun Jinyun, a professor of management at Fudan University, who focuses on startup research, said over 80 per cent of China’s internet success stories found their roots in business model innovation, but their limitations are obvious: over-reliance on the local market, a short life cycle, and the high risk of being duplicated by others.

The personnel reshuffle “could be a reflection of the shift from speed and market domination to value creation and organic growth, and 2019 could see several such changes”, Jin said.

Wang Lei, managing partner at China Impact Ventures, is even more optimistic. He said this marks the natural rebalancing of an industry that has proved to create value but such value might have been exaggerated in the |past.

“Therefore proper scaling down is essential for the sector’s long-term growth,” he said.

There are, of course, exceptions. Daniel Zhang, Alibaba’s CEO, said in February that instead of layoffs, the company will continue recruitment, strengthen its talent training program, and divert more resources to its multiple platforms to “help businesses navigate the current environment and create more job opportunities”.

The technology, described in the journal Advanced Materials, could be used in disaster situations, water crises or poverty-stricken areas and developing countries.

It relies on hydrogels, gel-polymer hybrid materials designed to be “super sponges” that can retain large amounts of water.

Researchers led by Guihua Yu from The University of Texas at Austin in the US used hydrogels that are both highly water absorbent and can release water upon heating.

This unique combination successfully worked in humid and dry weather conditions and is crucial to enabling the production of clean, safe drinking water from the air, the researchers said.

With an estimated 50,000 cubic kilometres of water contained in the atmosphere, this new system could tap into those reserves and potentially lead to small, inexpensive and portable filtration systems.

“We have developed a completely passive system where all you need to do is leave the hydrogel outside and it will collect water,” said Fei Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher on Yu’s team.

“The collected water will remain stored in the hydrogel until you expose it to sunlight. After about five minutes under natural sunlight, the water releases,” Zhao said in a statement.

This technology builds upon a 2018 breakthrough made by the researchers in which they developed a solar-powered water purification innovation using hydrogels that clean water from any source using only solar energy.

The team’s new innovation takes that work a step further by using the water that already exists in the atmosphere.

For both hydrogel-based technologies, Yu and his research team developed a way to combine materials that possess both hygroscopic (water-absorbing) qualities and thermal-responsive hydrophilicity.

“The new material is designed to both harvest moisture from the air and produce clean water under sunlight, avoiding intensive energy consumption,” said Yu, an associate professor of materials science and mechanical engineering.

The technology requires only solar power, is compact and can still produce enough water to meet the daily needs of an average household, researchers said.

Prototype tests showed daily water production of up to 50 litres per kilogram of hydrogel, they said.

Apprise Audit’s goal is to enhance worker interviews during social audits – by increasing frequency, inclusivity, confidentiality and consistency of worker screening. The app allows questions in multiple languages to be asked through audio recordings, answered through a smartphone and saved on a server. The app’s testing is being backed by global corporations VF Corporation and Li & Fung.

Apprise Audit aims to overcome obstacles to worker screening uncovered by the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society (UNU-CS) and anti-slavery NGO the Mekong Club, who surveyed over 170 anti-trafficking workers and over 200 social auditors.

For example, 71 per cent of the auditors surveyed stated that they select workers for screening based on language capability, and an overwhelming majority (95 per cent) stated that they speak one or two languages at most, meaning they often cannot reach out to migrants who speak another language.

The same study uncovered that workers are often interviewed in groups or near their managers and supervisors, so they will not talk to strangers and share their stories for fear of being punished.

During field research, a female worker said she had worked in a seafood processing factory for six years doing over four hours of overtime a day, but never got compensated for it.

She was told to lie to labour inspectors by her employer, who would always be there to listen to what she said.

She said she wished the labour inspector could have used a mobile app such as Apprise Audit when visiting factories, so that no one could hear her answers, or track the answers back to her, since the data collected by the app is anonymous. “No one wants to get in trouble by telling the truth but they all need help,” she said.

Silvia Mera, programme director at the Mekong Club, said: “Apprise Audit offers a time- and cost-effective way to interview workers.

“We are eager to test the app in the field and gather both social auditors’ and workers’ feedback to further advance this solution.”

Dr Hannah Thinyane, principal research fellow at UNU-CS, said: “Apprise Audit is a simple, yet effective way to empower workers to communicate with auditors. We do not aim at replacing in-person interviews, [but] rather offer one more tool to make these interviews more thorough.”

The app is also currently being tested in Vietnam and China by four major companies, including VF Corporation and Li & Fung.

“We are excited to see how this technology might help our field teams to gain insights into a sub-group of people who have historically been overlooked or underrepresented due to language barriers,” Kyle Bogler, general compliance manager for Asia at VF Corporation, said.

“Gaining these understandings and building effective remediation plans gives VF Corporation further opportunities to have a positive impact on the people and communities around the world.”

Results from the pilot project will be shared once the test phase of the project concludes at the end of March.