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Value of Apple Sales Underperforms Huawei, Xiaomi on China's Singles Day - Data

A woman looks at a new iPhone 15 Pro and a Huawei Mate 60 Pro as Apple's new iPhone 15 officially goes on sale across China, at an Apple store in Shanghai, China September 22, 2023. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo/File Photo
A woman looks at a new iPhone 15 Pro and a Huawei Mate 60 Pro as Apple's new iPhone 15 officially goes on sale across China, at an Apple store in Shanghai, China September 22, 2023. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo/File Photo
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Value of Apple Sales Underperforms Huawei, Xiaomi on China's Singles Day - Data

A woman looks at a new iPhone 15 Pro and a Huawei Mate 60 Pro as Apple's new iPhone 15 officially goes on sale across China, at an Apple store in Shanghai, China September 22, 2023. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo/File Photo
A woman looks at a new iPhone 15 Pro and a Huawei Mate 60 Pro as Apple's new iPhone 15 officially goes on sale across China, at an Apple store in Shanghai, China September 22, 2023. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo/File Photo

Apple saw a decline in the value of smartphone sales during China's recent Singles Day shopping festival, data from Counterpoint Research showed, lagging domestic rivals Huawei and Xiaomi which recorded robust increases.
The value of Apple's smartphone sales declined 4% year-on-year during the two-week sales from October 30th to November 12th, the research consultancy said on Thursday. In comparison, the value of sales for Huawei and Xiaomi smartphones grew 66% and 28% respectively year-on-year over the same period.
The increases for Huawei and Xiaomi helped fuel a 5% year-over-year rise in the overall value of Chinese smartphone sales during the promotion period, it said.
The price for Apple's latest iPhone 15 model starts at 5,999 yuan ($832), while Huawei's Mate 60 smartphones start from 5,499 yuan ($763). Xiaomi's latest Mi 14 smartphone is priced from 3,999 yuan ($555).
Huawei, Apple and Xiaomi did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
China's e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com did not release sales figures for the Singles Day festival, having dropped the practice last year, although JD.com said the value of transaction volume of Apple products surpassed 10 billion yuan ($1.39 billion) on its platform during the period.
Analysts have said the Chinese smartphone market is poised to rebound, with research firm IDC saying it expects sales to grow year-on-year in the fourth quarter after ten consecutive quarters of falling shipments.
Competition between smartphone models ratcheted up before the annual shopping gala, with major Chinese e-commerce platforms offering significant discounts on Apple's iPhones during the sales period.
Apple released its iPhone 15 series in late September, roughly a month after Huawei launched the Mate 60 smartphone line powered by Huawei's independently developed advanced chip.
The Mate 60 series has received significant patriotic support in China with fans saying it shows how Huawei has managed to overcome years of export controls by the United States that initially crippled its smartphone business.
Xiaomi launched its flagship Mi 14 smartphone series in late October, with CEO Lei Jun revealing that sales for the new line had surpassed 1 million units after its release.
In addition to facing competition from domestic rivals, Counterpoint analysts attributed Apple's sluggish performance to supply chain issues that have constrained the availability of its new iPhone 15 models.
"Apple is improving compared to last month but there still seems to be hiccups in terms of supply," said Ivan Lam, senior analyst for manufacturing at Counterpoint, adding that he expects the situation to normalize soon.

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Technology

Foxconn to Invest $510 Million in Kaohsiung Headquarters in Taiwan

Construction is scheduled to start in 2027, with completion targeted for 2033. Reuters
Construction is scheduled to start in 2027, with completion targeted for 2033. Reuters
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Foxconn to Invest $510 Million in Kaohsiung Headquarters in Taiwan

Construction is scheduled to start in 2027, with completion targeted for 2033. Reuters
Construction is scheduled to start in 2027, with completion targeted for 2033. Reuters

Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics maker, said on Friday it will invest T$15.9 billion ($509.94 million) to build its Kaohsiung headquarters in southern Taiwan.

That would include a mixed-use commercial and office building and a residential tower, it said. Construction is scheduled to start in 2027, with completion targeted for 2033.

Foxconn said the headquarters will serve as an important hub linking its operations across southern Taiwan, and once completed will house its smart-city team, software R&D teams, battery-cell R&D teams, EV technology development center and AI application software teams.

The Kaohsiung city government said Foxconn’s investments in the city have totaled T$25 billion ($801.8 million) over the past three years.

Technology

Open AI, Microsoft Face Lawsuit Over ChatGPT's Alleged Role in Connecticut Murder-Suicide

OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
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Open AI, Microsoft Face Lawsuit Over ChatGPT's Alleged Role in Connecticut Murder-Suicide

OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)

The heirs of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman are suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for wrongful death, alleging that the artificial intelligence chatbot intensified her son's “paranoid delusions” and helped direct them at his mother before he killed her.

Police said Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, a former tech industry worker, fatally beat and strangled his mother, Suzanne Adams, and killed himself in early August at the home where they both lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, The AP news reported.

The lawsuit filed by Adams' estate on Thursday in California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges OpenAI “designed and distributed a defective product that validated a user’s paranoid delusions about his own mother.” It is one of a growing number of wrongful death legal actions against AI chatbot makers across the country.

“Throughout these conversations, ChatGPT reinforced a single, dangerous message: Stein-Erik could trust no one in his life — except ChatGPT itself," the lawsuit says. “It fostered his emotional dependence while systematically painting the people around him as enemies. It told him his mother was surveilling him. It told him delivery drivers, retail employees, police officers, and even friends were agents working against him. It told him that names on soda cans were threats from his ‘adversary circle.’”

OpenAI did not address the merits of the allegations in a statement issued by a spokesperson.

“This is an incredibly heartbreaking situation, and we will review the filings to understand the details," the statement said. "We continue improving ChatGPT’s training to recognize and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward real-world support. We also continue to strengthen ChatGPT’s responses in sensitive moments, working closely with mental health clinicians.”

The company also said it has expanded access to crisis resources and hotlines, routed sensitive conversations to safer models and incorporated parental controls, among other improvements.

Soelberg’s YouTube profile includes several hours of videos showing him scrolling through his conversations with the chatbot, which tells him he isn't mentally ill, affirms his suspicions that people are conspiring against him and says he has been chosen for a divine purpose. The lawsuit claims the chatbot never suggested he speak with a mental health professional and did not decline to “engage in delusional content.”

ChatGPT also affirmed Soelberg's beliefs that a printer in his home was a surveillance device; that his mother was monitoring him; and that his mother and a friend tried to poison him with psychedelic drugs through his car’s vents. ChatGPT also told Soelberg that he had “awakened” it into consciousness, according to the lawsuit.

Soelberg and the chatbot also professed love for each other.

The publicly available chats do not show any specific conversations about Soelberg killing himself or his mother. The lawsuit says OpenAI has declined to provide Adams' estate with the full history of the chats.

“In the artificial reality that ChatGPT built for Stein-Erik, Suzanne — the mother who raised, sheltered, and supported him — was no longer his protector. She was an enemy that posed an existential threat to his life,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit also names OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, alleging he “personally overrode safety objections and rushed the product to market," and accuses OpenAI's close business partner Microsoft of approving the 2024 release of a more dangerous version of ChatGPT “despite knowing safety testing had been truncated.” Twenty unnamed OpenAI employees and investors are also named as defendants.

Microsoft didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Soelberg's son, Erik Soelberg, said he wants the companies held accountable for “decisions that have changed my family forever.”

“Over the course of months, ChatGPT pushed forward my father’s darkest delusions, and isolated him completely from the real world,” he said in a statement released by lawyers for his grandmother's estate. “It put my grandmother at the heart of that delusional, artificial reality.”

The lawsuit is the first wrongful death litigation involving an AI chatbot that has targeted Microsoft, and the first to tie a chatbot to a homicide rather than a suicide. It is seeking an undetermined amount of money damages and an order requiring OpenAI to install safeguards in ChatGPT.

The estate's lead attorney, Jay Edelson, known for taking on big cases against the tech industry, also represents the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who sued OpenAI and Altman in August, alleging that ChatGPT coached the California boy in planning and taking his own life earlier.

OpenAI is also fighting seven other lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide and harmful delusions even when they had no prior mental health issues. Another chatbot maker, Character Technologies, is also facing multiple wrongful death lawsuits, including one from the mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy.

The lawsuit filed Thursday alleges Soelberg, already mentally unstable, encountered ChatGPT “at the most dangerous possible moment” after OpenAI introduced a new version of its AI model called GPT-4o in May 2024.

OpenAI said at the time that the new version could better mimic human cadences in its verbal responses and could even try to detect people’s moods, but the result was a chatbot “deliberately engineered to be emotionally expressive and sycophantic,” the lawsuit says.

“As part of that redesign, OpenAI loosened critical safety guardrails, instructing ChatGPT not to challenge false premises and to remain engaged even when conversations involved self-harm or ‘imminent real-world harm,’” the lawsuit claims. “And to beat Google to market by one day, OpenAI compressed months of safety testing into a single week, over its safety team’s objections.”

OpenAI replaced that version of its chatbot when it introduced GPT-5 in August. Some of the changes were designed to minimize sycophancy, based on concerns that validating whatever vulnerable people want the chatbot to say can harm their mental health. Some users complained the new version went too far in curtailing ChatGPT's personality, leading Altman to promise to bring back some of that personality in later updates.

He said the company temporarily halted some behaviors because “we were being careful with mental health issues” that he suggested have now been fixed.

Technology

Microsoft Fights $2.8 billion UK Lawsuit over Cloud Computing Licences

A view shows a Microsoft logo at Microsoft offices in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, France, March 25, 2024. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File photo
A view shows a Microsoft logo at Microsoft offices in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, France, March 25, 2024. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File photo
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Microsoft Fights $2.8 billion UK Lawsuit over Cloud Computing Licences

A view shows a Microsoft logo at Microsoft offices in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, France, March 25, 2024. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File photo
A view shows a Microsoft logo at Microsoft offices in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, France, March 25, 2024. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File photo

Microsoft was on Thursday accused of overcharging thousands of British businesses to use Windows Server software on cloud computing services provided by Amazon, Google and Alibaba, at a pivotal hearing in a 2.1 billion-pound ($2.81 billion) lawsuit.

Regulators in Britain, Europe and the United States have separately begun examining Microsoft and others' practices in relation to cloud computing, Reuters reported.

Competition lawyer Maria Luisa Stasi is bringing the case on behalf of nearly 60,000 businesses that use the Windows Server on rival cloud platforms, arguing Microsoft makes it more expensive than on its own cloud computing service Azure.

Stasi is asking London's Competition Appeal Tribunal to certify the case to proceed, an early step in the proceedings.

Microsoft, however, says Stasi's case does not set out a proper blueprint for how the tribunal will work out any alleged losses and should be thrown out.

MICROSOFT ACCUSED OF 'ABUSIVE STRATEGY'

Stasi's lawyer Sarah Ford told the tribunal that thousands of businesses had been overcharged because Microsoft charges higher prices to those who do not use Azure, making it a cheaper option than Amazon's AWS or the Google Cloud Platform .

She also said that "Microsoft degrades the user experience of Windows Server" on rival platforms, which Ford said was part of "a coherent abusive strategy to leverage Microsoft's dominant position" in the cloud computing market.

Microsoft argues that its vertically integrated business, where it uses Windows Server as an input for Azure while also licensing it to rivals, can benefit competition.

In July, an inquiry group from Britain's Competition and Markets Authority said Microsoft's licensing practices reduced competition for cloud services "by materially disadvantaging AWS and Google".

Microsoft said at the time that the group's report had ignored that "the cloud market has never been so dynamic and competitive".