Wistron chairman Simon Lin, commenting on Taiwan ODMs' future development, has pointed out that most makers have been keen on transforming themselves into industrial brands similar to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Lin expects Wistron to see around 10% of its overall revenues from industrial brand business by 2020.

Over the past few years, Wistron has been cutting down its reliance on the notebook business and has successfully increased the revenue contribution from non-notebook product lines especially the server and the smartphone.

Wistron's server subsidiary Wiwynn is scheduled to be listed on Taiwan's over-the-counter (OTC) market in 2018.

Lin is optimistic about Wistron's development in 2018 and expects its investments in Industry 4.0 and digital transformation applications during the past 2-3 years to start bearing fruit in 2018.

Lin pointed out that Wistron's strong supply chain management ability has established the foundation of the company's new IoT and Internet services. With the IoT applications market set to see sharp growths, shipments of related end devices have already increased dramatically from hundreds of thousands a month 10 years ago to millions, and the management ability will allow Wistron to stay competitive.

As for the competition from China, Lin believes China's ODMs will not pose any major threat in the short term as the China government is currently focusing on the development of flat panel, semiconductor and artificial intelligence (AI) applications that have strategic purposes.

As for the smartphone business, Lin pointed out that the industry is unlikely to see any major growth in the short term, but the industry has a scale much larger than that of the PC and offers good profitability. From manufacturing's perspective, smartphone products are more complicated than PC and cannot only relying on increasing manpower to enhance the production efficiency and will need to pair with better manufacturing processes and assistance from AI, Lin added.