Seeing the notebook industry suffering from weak demand, Taiwan-based cooling fan maker Sunonwealth Electric Machine Industry has turned its focus to non-PC product businesses with the notebook cooling fan business currently accounting for just 30% of revenues, according to the company.
Currently, most cooling fan makers are aggressively developing either large cooling fans for servers in datacenters and commercial refrigerators, or micro cooling fans with 3mm thickness.
Sunonwealth pointed out that 3mm micro fans have already been adopted broadly in products such as ultrabooks, and demand is expected to surge after the release of 4G LTE handsets, which will require better cooling efficiency due to heat generated from multi-tasking and communications.
Wearable devices are also a business opportunity for micro fans. Some market watchers pointed out that Sony's new wearable device has adopted micro fans for cooling.
Currently, Sunonwealth has 10-15% of its revenues come from the cloud computing communication business. The company shipped 129 million fans in 2012 and 97 million units in the first three quarters of 2013.
