The global smartphone and PC markets face potential contractions of up to 5.2% and 8.9% respectively in 2026, according to downside risk scenarios from IDC that trace the problem to memory chip manufacturers shifting production capacity away from consumer electronics toward AI data centers. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology have pivoted their limited cleanroom space toward high-bandwidth memory for AI servers, restricting supply of the conventional DRAM and NAND used in phones and laptops.

IDC expects 2026 DRAM supply growth to hit 16% year-on-year, below historical norms. The smartphone industry's decade-long trend of bringing flagship features to affordable devices is reversing. Memory represents 15-20% of the bill of materials for mid-range phones, and thin-margin vendors like Xiaomi, Realme and Transsion will bear the brunt. Apple and Samsung have long-term supply agreements securing components up to 24 months ahead. PC vendors including Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer and ASUS have warned clients of 15-20% price increases heading into the second half of 2026.

The FCC has banned approval of new foreign-made drones and components, citing "an unacceptable risk" to national security. The move will most heavily impact DJI but it "does not affect drones or drone components that are currently sold in the United States." Reuters reports: The tech was placed on the commission's "Covered List," barring DJI and other foreign drone manufacturers from receiving the FCC's approval to sell new drone models for import or sale in the U.S. In Monday's announcement, the agency said that the move "will reduce the risk of direct [drone] attacks and disruptions, unauthorized surveillance, sensitive data exfiltration and other [drone] threats to the homeland."

FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in a statement that while drones offer the potential to boost public safety and the U.S.' posture on global innovation, "criminals, terrorists and hostile foreign actors have intensified their weaponization of these technologies, creating new and serious threats to our homeland."

The ruling comes as China hawks in Congress amplify warnings about the security risks of drones made by DJI, which accounts for more than 90% of the global market share. But efforts to crack down on Capitol Hill have been met with some pushback due to the potential impacts of curbing the drone usage on U.S. businesses and law enforcement. A wide variety of sectors, including construction, energy, agriculture and mining companies, as well as local police and fire departments across the country, deploy DJI-made drones.

In 2023 Slashdot covered a battery-swapping startup that promised to give EVs a full charge in about the same time it takes to fill a tank of gas.

They just filed for bankruptcy, reports Inc: Ample was founded in 2014 with a goal of "solving slow charging times and infrastructure incompatibility" for commercial EV fleets such as those in logistics, ride-hailing, and delivery, the filing states. To-date, Ample has raised more than $330 million across five rounds of funding to finance research and development and deployment. Rather than tackling fast charging, its strategy involved developing "fully autonomous modular battery swapping," capable of delivering a fully charged battery in just five minutes. The technology requires purpose-built "Ample stations" that look a little like carwashes. A car is guided into the bay and elevated on a platform. A robot then identifies the location of a car's battery module, removes it, and replaces it with a charged module, Canary Media reported.

The company also boasts partnerships with Uber, Mitsubishi, and Stellantis, and notes it has deployed its technology — or is pursuing deployment — in San Francisco, Madrid and Tokyo. Even so, it ran up against funding issues. In its filing, Ample attributed its bankruptcy to macroeconomic and industry headwinds, such as "severe supply chain disruptions," "contraction in both public and private investment in renewable energy" and the "reduction, delay, or redirection of government incentives intended to accelerate EV adoption." The filing notes that regulatory and permitting delays slowed its launch in international markets, after which access to capital foiled its scaling efforts. The company eliminated all but two full-time, non-executive employees after formerly employing about 200...

Electrek noted that Ample is the second battery swapping startup to go bankrupt after California-based Better Place in collapsed in 2013 amid financial issues related to how capital intensive it was to build infrastructure, Reuters reported. And Tesla briefly pursued the concept, building a station in California, before ditching the idea altogether.
Ample "claimed to have designed autonomous battery swapping stations that would be rapidly deployable, cheap to build, and could adapt to any EV design with a modular battery which would be easy for manufacturers to use," notes Electrek's article: Where this bankruptcy leaves Ample's technology is unclear. Another company could snap it up and try to do something with it, if they find that the technology is real and useful. Ample had gotten investments and partnerships with Shell, Mitsubishi and Stellantis, for example, so the company wasn't alone in touting its tech. Or, it could just disappear, as other EV battery swapping plans have before...

That's not to say that nobody has been successful at at implementing battery swap, though. NIO seems to be successful with its battery swapping tech in China, though the company did miss its 2025 scaling goals by a longshot. But as of yet, this is the only notable example of a successful battery swap initiative, and it was done by an automaker itself, rather than a startup claiming to work for every automaker.
Electrek's writer is "just not bullish on battery swapping as a solution in general. Currently, the fastest-charging vehicles can charge from 10-80% in about 18 minutes. While that's longer than 5 minutes, it's not really a terrible amount of time to spend during most stops."

Plus, if cars come and go in 5 minutes instead of 18 minutes, "then you're going to have more than triple the throughput at peak utilization." And Ample's prices would be about the same as normal EV quick-charging prices...

The television industry's brightness war may have hit its inflection point in 2025, the year TCL and Hisense released the first consumer TVs capable of 5,000 nits under specific settings -- a figure that would have seemed absurd not long ago when manufacturers struggled to reach 2,000 nits. LG introduced Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology, moving from a three-stack panel design to a four-stack red-blue-green-blue configuration that the company claims can achieve 4,000 nits. The technology appears in the LG G5, Panasonic Z95B and Philips OLED950 and OLED910.

RGB mini-LED also emerged as a new category. The technology uses individual small red, green and blue LED backlights instead of white or blue LEDs paired with quantum dots. Hisense demonstrated it at CES 2025, TCL announced its Q10M for China, and Samsung unveiled its own version called micro-RGB. These sets range from $12,000 to $30,000. Sony has confirmed it will debut RGB TV technology in spring 2026. HDR content is currently mastered at a maximum of 4,000 nits. The situation echoes the audio industry's loudness war, The Verge points out, which peaked with Metallica's heavily compressed Death Magnetic in 2008.

mprindle writes: The Texas Attorney General sued five major television manufacturers, accusing them of illegally collecting their users' data by secretly recording what they watch using Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology.

The lawsuits target Sony, Samsung, LG, and China-based companies Hisense and TCL Technology Group Corporation. Attorney General Ken Paxton's office also highlighted "serious concerns" about the two Chinese companies being required to follow China's National Security Law, which could give the Chinese government access to U.S. consumers' data.

According to complaints filed this Monday in Texas state courts, the TV makers can allegedly use ACR technology to capture screenshots of television displays every 500 milliseconds, monitor the users' viewing activity in real time, and send this information back to the companies' servers without the users' knowledge or consent.

"As Australia began enforcing a world-first social media ban for children under 16 years old this week, Denmark is planning to follow its lead," reports the Associated Press, "and severely restrict social media access for young people." The Danish government announced last month that it had secured an agreement by three governing coalition and two opposition parties in parliament to ban access to social media for anyone under the age of 15. Such a measure would be the most sweeping step yet by a European Union nation to limit use of social media among teens and children.

The Danish government's plans could become law as soon as mid-2026. The proposed measure would give some parents the right to let their children access social media from age 13, local media reported, but the ministry has not yet fully shared the plans... [A] new "digital evidence" app, announced by the Digital Affairs Ministry last month and expected to launch next spring, will likely form the backbone of the Danish plans. The app will display an age certificate to ensure users comply with social media age limits, the ministry said.
The article also notes Malaysia "is expected to ban social media accounts for people under the age of 16 starting at the beginning of next year, and Norway is also taking steps to restrict social media access for children and teens.

"China — which manufacturers many of the world's digital devices — has set limits on online gaming time and smartphone time for kids."

Major automakers have urged Washington to prevent Chinese government-backed automakers and battery manufacturers from opening U.S. manufacturing plants, warning the industry's future is at stake. From a report: The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Ford, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Stellantis and other major automakers, sounded the alarm and said Congress and the Trump administration needed to act.

"China poses a clear and present threat to the auto industry in the U.S.," the group wrote in a statement for a U.S. House hearing on Chinese vehicles. The group also said lawmakers should maintain the U.S. Commerce Department's prohibition on importing information and communications technology and services from China that effectively bars the import of vehicles from Chinese manufacturers. "No amount of investment by automakers and battery manufacturers operating inside the U.S. can counter a China that is enabled by subsidies to chronically oversupply around the world. This is a recipe for dumping that Congress and the Trump Administration must prevent from happening inside the U.S.," the auto industry group said.

IBM is buying Confluent for $11 billion in a major push to own real-time data streaming infrastructure essential for enterprise AI workloads. It marks Big Blue's biggest acquisition since Red Hat in 2019. Bloomberg reports: The AI boom has touched off billions of dollars in deals for businesses that build, train or leverage the technology, propelling the value of an entire ecosystem of data center developers, software makers, generative AI tool developers and data management firms. Mountain View, California-based Confluent sits in the data corner of that world, providing a platform for companies to gather -- or "stream" -- and analyze data in real time as opposed to shipping data in clunkier batches.

Manufacturers such as Michelin, for example, have used Confluent's platform to optimize their inventories of raw and semi-finished materials live. Instacart adopted Confluent to develop real-time fraud detection systems and gain more visibility into the availability of products sold on its grocery delivery platform. Businesses are increasingly tapping AI systems that manage tasks like this in real-time and require live flows of data to do so. IBM, which pioneered mainframe computers, has been trying to reposition its business around AI over the past few years. Under Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna, it's been buying software companies and selling generative AI-related services to enterprise clients. Software now makes up almost half its total revenue and continues to grow at a steady rate.

CNN's prediction for 2026? "Any device that uses memory, from phones to tablets and smartwatches, could get pricier." But will it be a little or a lot?

The article cites an analysis from multinational strategy/management consulting firm McKinsey & Company which found America's data center demand could continue growing by 20 to 25 percent per year" through 2030. "That's prompted memory manufacturers like Micron and Samsung to shift their focus to data centers, which use a different type of memory, meaning fewer resources for consumer products. (Jaejune Kim, executive VP for memory at Samsung, said in October that their third quarter saw strong demand for memory for AI and data centers, and that they expected the supply shortage for mobile and PC memory to "intensify further.") Memory prices are rising for consumer products because major manufacturers are instead ramping up production for AI data centers as artificial intelligence companies boom. "It's pretty much brutal and crunched across the board," said Yang Wang, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.

The International Data Corporation, a global market research firm, reported earlier this week that the smartphone market is expected to decline by 0.9% in 2026 in part because of memory shortages. Memory prices are expected to surge by 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and may climb an additional 20% early next year, Counterpoint Research said last month... TrendForce, a research firm that follows the semiconductor industry, estimates memory price hikes have made smartphones 8% to 10% more expensive to produce in 2025 (higher production costs don't always translate into higher consumer prices for a variety of reasons).

Some smartphones could cost more as soon as early next year, said Nabila Popal, a senior research director for the International Data Corporation. Cheap Android phones may see the biggest impact, since less expensive products usually have thinner margins. "It's going to be almost impossible for them to not raise prices" of cheaper Android phones, said Popal. Companies may also postpone phone launches to focus on expensive models that may be more profitable. The average selling price for smartphones is expected to climb to $465 in 2026, compared to $457 in 2025, according to Popal, putting the smartphone market at a record high value of $578.9 billion.

But the pendulum is expected to swing back in the other direction late next year as the supply chain adjusts, according to Popal and Wang, potentially bringing prices back down or at least capping increases.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A few years ago, Paul Wieland, a 44-year-old information technology professional living in New York's Adirondack Mountains, was wrapping up a home renovation when he ran into a hiccup. He wanted to be able to control his new garage door with his smartphone. But the options available, including a product called MyQ, required connecting to a company's internet servers. He believed a "smart" garage door should operate only over a local Wi-Fi network to protect a home's privacy, so he started building his own system to plug into his garage door. By 2022, he had developed a prototype, which he named RATGDO, for Rage Against the Garage Door Opener. He had hoped to sell 100 of his new gadgets just to recoup expenses, but he ended up selling tens of thousands. That's because MyQ's maker did what a number of other consumer device manufacturers have done over the last few years, much to the frustration of their customers: It changed the device, making it both less useful and more expensive to operate.

Chamberlain Group, a company that makes garage door openers, had created the MyQ hubs so that virtually any garage door opener could be controlled with home automation software from Apple, Google, Nest and others. Chamberlain also offered a free MyQ smartphone app. Two years ago, Chamberlain started shutting down support for most third-party access to its MyQ servers. The company said it was trying to improve the reliability of its products. But this effectively broke connections that people had set up to work with Apple's Home app or Google's Home app, among others. Chamberlain also started working with partners that charge subscriptions for their services, though a basic app to control garage doors was still free.

While Mr. Wieland said RATGDO sales spiked after Chamberlain made those changes, he believes the popularity of his device is about more than just opening and closing a garage. It stems from widespread frustration with companies that sell internet-connected hardware that they eventually change or use to nickel-and-dime customers with subscription fees. "You should own the hardware, and there is a line there that a lot of companies are experimenting with," Mr. Wieland said in a recent interview. "I'm really afraid for the future that consumers are going to swallow this and that's going to become the norm." [...] For Mr. Wieland, the fight isn't over. He started a company named RATCLOUD, for Rage Against the Cloud. He said he was developing similar products that were not yet for sale.

A severe spike in global DRAM prices has pushed Samsung Semiconductor to refuse a long-term RAM order from its own sibling, Samsung Electronics. The move is forcing the smartphone division into short, expensive renegotiations, which will likely mean higher costs for consumer devices. PCWorld reports: Samsung subsidiaries are, naturally, going to look to Samsung Semiconductor first when they need parts. Such was reportedly the case for Samsung Electronics, in search of memory supplies for its newest smartphones as the company ramps up production for 2026 flagship designs. But with so much RAM hardware going into new "AI" data centers -- and those companies willing to pay top dollar for their hardware -- memory manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are prioritizing data center suppliers to maximize profits.

The end result, according to a report from SE Daily spotted by SamMobile, is that Samsung Semiconductor rejected the original order for smartphone DRAM chips from Samsung Electronics' Mobile Experience division. The smartphone manufacturing arm of the company had hoped to nail down pricing and supply for another year. But reports say that due to "chipflation," the phone-making division must renegotiate quarterly, with a long-term supply deal rejected by its corporate sibling. A short-term deal, with higher prices, was reportedly hammered out.

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: [T]he Trump administration announced less stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in an effort to bring down the price of new vehicles. The administration says that rules put in place by the Biden administration broke the law by going beyond the requirements mandated by Congress when the CAFE program was started. The new regulations will require automakers to meet an average fuel-economy figure of 34.5 mpg across 2031-model-year vehicles, instead of the 50.4 mpg that would have been required under the previous regulations. sinij comments: "This is a much-needed move as they also recently closed a number of loopholes, such as the assumed fuel-savings credit for engine start-stop technology, that made it more difficult to meet these goals. More so, a recent string of engine and transmission failures from multiple manufacturers shows that meeting fleet standards came at a very significant cost of reduced reliability."

India has withdrawn its order requiring Apple and other smartphone makers to preinstall the government's Sanchar Saathi app after public backlash and privacy concerns. AppleInsider reports: On November 28, the India Ministry of Communication issued a secret directive to Apple and other smartphone manufacturers, requiring the preinstallation of a government-backed app. Less than a week later, the order has been rescinded. The withdrawal on Wednesday means Apple doesn't have to preload the Sanchar Saathi app onto iPhones sold in the country, in a way that couldn't be "disabled or restricted." [...]

In pulling back from the demand, the government insisted that the app had an "increasing acceptance" among citizens. There was a tenfold spike of new user registrations on Tuesday alone, with over 600,000 new users made aware of the app from the public debacle. India Minister of Communications Jyotiraditya Scindia took a moment to insist that concerns the app could be used for increased surveillance were unfounded. "Snooping is neither possible nor will it happen" with the app, Scindia claimed.

"This is a welcome development, but we are still awaiting the full text of the legal order that should accompany this announcement, including any revised directions under the Cyber Security Rules, 2024," said the Internet Freedom Foundation. It is treating the news with "cautious optimism, not closure," until formalities conclude. However, while promising, the backdown doesn't stop India from retrying something similar or another tactic in the future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The San Francisco city attorney filed on Tuesday the nation's first government lawsuit against food manufacturers over ultraprocessed fare (source may be paywalled; alternative source), arguing that cities and counties have been burdened with the costs of treating diseases that stem from the companies' products. David Chiu, the city attorney, sued 10 corporations that make some of the country's most popular food and drinks. Ultraprocessed products now comprise 70 percent of the American food supply and fill grocery store shelves with a kaleidoscope of colorful packages. Think Slim Jim meat sticks and Cool Ranch Doritos. But also aisles of breads, sauces and granola bars marketed as natural or healthy.

It is a rare issue on which the liberal leaders in San Francisco City Hall are fully aligned with the Trump administration, which has targeted ultraprocessed foods as part of its Make America Healthy Again mantra. Mr. Chiu's lawsuit, which was filed in San Francisco Superior Court on behalf of the State of California, seeks unspecified damages for the costs that local governments bear for treating residents whose health has been harmed by ultraprocessed food. The city accuses the companies of "unfair and deceptive acts" in how they market and sell their foods, arguing that such practices violate the state's Unfair Competition Law and public nuisance statute. The city also argues the companies knew that their food made people sick but sold it anyway.

Digital Trends reports: A wave of shortages now threatens to ripple across RAM, SSDs, and even hard drives, affecting not only performance-hungry rigs but also everyday systems.

— CyberPowerPC has publicly confirmed it will raise prices on all systems starting December 7th due to RAM costs spiking by 500% and SSD prices doubling since October.

— Memory suppliers warn of a global DRAM and SSD shortage running into late 2026 or even 2027, driven heavily by AI server demand.

— As reported by Bloomberg, Lenovo has already stockpiled memory to ride out the crunch and maintain steadier PC pricing.

— Among other OEMs, HP, in its recent earnings call, flagged possible price increases or lower-spec models on the back of rising component costs.
But Apple "may also be in a good position to weather the shortage," reports Ars Technica, since "analysts at Morgan Stanley and Bernstein Research believe that Apple has already laid claim to the RAM that it needs and that its healthy profit margins will allow it to absorb the increases better than most."

Ars Technica also shows how much RAM and storage prices have jumped — sometimes as much as 2x or even 3x in just three months. "In short, there's no escaping these price increases, which affect SSDs and both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM kits of all capacities (though higher-capacity RAM kits do seem to be hit a little harder)." Memory and storage shortages can be particularly difficult to get through. As with all chips, it can take years to ramp up capacity and/or build new manufacturing facilities... And memory makers in particular may be slow to ramp up manufacturing capacity in response to shortages. If they decide to start manufacturing more chips now, what happens if memory demand drops off a cliff in six months or a year (if, say, an AI bubble deflates or pops altogether)? It means an oversupply of memory chips — consumers benefit from rock-bottom prices for components, but it becomes harder for manufacturers to cover their costs... The upshot is: Not only are memory prices getting bad now, but it's exceptionally difficult to predict when shortage-fueled price hikes might end...

Tom's Hardware reports that AMD has told its partners that it expects to raise GPU prices by about 10 percent starting next year and that Nvidia may have canceled a planned RTX 50-series Super launch entirely because of shortages and price increases.

The UK government will levy a pay-per-mile tax on electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles starting April 2028, UK's finance minister Rachel Reeves announced, a measure designed to offset some of the fuel duty revenue that will disappear as drivers shift away from petrol and diesel cars. Electric vehicles will be charged 3 pence per mile and plug-in hybrids 1.5 pence per mile, payable annually alongside car tax. An average driver covering 8,000 miles a year would pay around $320, roughly half what a petrol or diesel driver pays in fuel duty.

The Office for Budget Responsibility expects the tax to generate $1.45 billion in its first year and $2.51 billion by 2030-31, offsetting about a quarter of the revenue losses projected from the EV transition by 2050. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders warned the new charge would "suppress demand" and make sales targets harder to achieve. New Zealand and Iceland have already introduced road pricing for EVs; demand dropped in the former but held steady in the latter.

European manufacturers are facing a two-front assault from China that has German industry associations warning of deindustrialisation: on one side, artificially cheap Chinese goods are flooding into Europe, and on the other, Beijing has demonstrated its willingness to abruptly cut off access to critical inputs like rare earths and semiconductors.

The alarm intensified in October when China added five rare earths to its export-licensing regime and then banned exports of computer chips made by Nexperia, a Dutch-headquartered but Chinese-owned chipmaker that supplies numerous European carmakers, according to The Economist.

Several European firms warned of production stoppages, and some German companies put workers on leave without pay. Germany's trade deficit with China hit $76.52 billion last year and is expected to surge to around $100.87 billion this year, The Economist reported, driven by collapsing German exports and a rush of imports in categories like cars, chemicals, and machinery that were once German specialties. Chinese brands now account for 20% of Europe's hybrid market and 11% of electric vehicle sales. German cars command just 17% of the Chinese market, down from 27% in 2020.

The rare earth controls were suspended for a year after the US and China struck a trade deal on October 30th, but the EU found itself a bystander to negotiations that directly affected its economy. Writing in the Financial Times, Robin Harding argues that China's explicit goal of self-sufficiency leaves Europe with few options. "There is nothing that China wants to import, nothing it does not believe it can make better and cheaper," he wrote, concluding that large-scale protectionism may be unavoidable if Europe wants to retain any industry at all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: They're cute, even cuddly, and promise learning and companionship -- but artificial intelligence toys are not safe for kids, according to children's and consumer advocacy groups urging parents not to buy them during the holiday season. These toys, marketed to kids as young as 2 years old, are generally powered by AI models that have already been shown to harm children and teenagers, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to an advisory published Thursday by the children's advocacy group Fairplay and signed by more than 150 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators.

"The serious harms that AI chatbots have inflicted on children are well-documented, including fostering obsessive use, having explicit sexual conversations, and encouraging unsafe behaviors, violence against others, and self-harm," Fairplay said. AI toys, made by companies including Curio Interactive and Keyi Technologies, are often marketed as educational, but Fairplay says they can displace important creative and learning activities. They promise friendship but disrupt children's relationships and resilience, the group said. "What's different about young children is that their brains are being wired for the first time and developmentally it is natural for them to be trustful, for them to seek relationships with kind and friendly characters," said Rachel Franz, director of Fairplay's Young Children Thrive Offline Program. Because of this, she added, the trust young children are placing in these toys can exacerbate the types of harms older children are already experiencing with AI chatbots.

A separate report Thursday by Common Sense Media and psychiatrists at Stanford University's medical school warned teenagers against using popular AI chatbots as therapists. Fairplay, a 25-year-old organization formerly known as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, has been warning about AI toys for years. They just weren't as advanced as they are today. A decade ago, during an emerging fad of internet-connected toys and AI speech recognition, the group helped lead a backlash against Mattel's talking Hello Barbie doll that it said was recording and analyzing children's conversations. This time, though AI toys are mostly sold online and more popular in Asia than elsewhere, Franz said some have started to appear on store shelves in the U.S. and more could be on the way. "Everything has been released with no regulation and no research, so it gives us extra pause when all of a sudden we see more and more manufacturers, including Mattel, who recently partnered with OpenAI, potentially putting out these products," Franz said. Last week, consumer advocates at U.S. PIRG called out the trend of buying AI toys in its annual "Trouble in Toyland" report. This year, the organization tested four toys that use AI chatbots. "We found some of these toys will talk in-depth about sexually explicit topics, will offer advice on where a child can find matches or knives, act dismayed when you say you have to leave, and have limited or no parental controls," the report said.

Chinese automakers are rapidly expanding across South America, boosted by the new Chinese-built Port of Chancay, aggressive pricing, local partnerships, and growing regional demand. Reuters reports: China has been ramping up sales since the opening last year of the Port of Chancay, north of Lima. The Chinese-built megaport has halved trans-Pacific shipping times just as Chinese manufacturers face rising barriers to entry in the United States and greater trade restrictions in Europe.

BYD, which makes EVs, plug-in hybrids and combustion engine cars, plans to open a fourth dealership in Lima by the end of this year, while Chery and Geely have more than a dozen in total in Peru. Chinese carmakers face a profit-destroying price war at home and a growing surplus of new cars rolling out of Chinese factory lines. Much of this excess is being shipped overseas to the Middle East, Central Asia and Latin America, according to global automotive analyst Felipe Munoz at JATO Dynamics.

The Chinese have "carved out space," across both electric and petrol-powered cars, said Martin Bresciani, president of Chile's automotive business chamber, CAVEM. "The Chinese have already demonstrated that they match global standards in quality." Chinese brands reached 29.6% of all new passenger car sales in Chile in the first quarter of this year. [...] Part of China's success has been partnering with trusted local importers to offer more affordable models tailored to regional tastes, according to seven dealerships Reuters spoke to in Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina.

TV manufacturers are abandoning their attempts to turn TVs into interactive social devices through smart cameras. Sky announced this month that it will discontinue Sky Live, a camera accessory for its Sky Glass televisions that brought video calls, body-tracked workouts, and motion games to the living room. The device will stop working at the beginning of December. Sky will brick the cameras and reimburse customers. Sky launched the product in mid-2023 as part of an effort to transform televisions from passive viewing devices into interactive platforms.

That vision has not materialized across the industry. LG's Smart Cam, released in 2023, is out of stock at major retailers and appears discontinued. TCL's smart TV camera is no longer available. Samsung stopped integrating cameras directly into its television sets, though it still sells an external camera accessory.