Personal tech

PLUS: Indian telco ponders broadband satellites; Samsung goes all-in on OpenAI; Vietnam centrally plans ten tech giants; and more!

Buyers in the world’s two most populous nations, India and China, bought just 13.1 million PCs in the first quarter of 2026, according to analyst firm Omdia.

The firm’s analysts last week declared that Indian buyers acquired 4.4 million PCs – 3.5 million of them laptops – during Q1. That figure represented 32 percent year-over-year growth.

“Brands and channels front-loaded their inventory, to secure pricing ahead of anticipated increases,” the firm wrote. “This triggered a 43 percent surge in the consumer market as buyers moved to purchase high-performance PCs at older price points, a trend amplified by intense online retail promotions.”

On Monday, Omdia published Q1 PC sales data for China and found total shipments of 8.9 million – a two-percent year-over-year decline.

Senior analyst Emma Xu blamed the slump on the end of government subsidies that Beijing used to keep consumer spending buoyant.

Whatever the reason for the drop in shipments, it meant that the two nations – combined population 2.9 billion, or 36 percent of global population – bought 13.1 million PCs in the quarter, or 20 percent of the 68.44 million PCs Omdia says shipped worldwide in Q1.

Omdia forecasts China will experience a 14 percent PC shipment slump in 2026, while Indian shipments will dip by 5.3 percent across the year.

The firm believes rising component costs will push PC prices beyond the reach of local purchasers.

Samsung signs up for OpenAI everywhere

Samsung has gone all-in on OpenAI, adopting the upstart’s ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex tools for all employees in its Korean home and all Device eXperience (DX) employees worldwide.

“Samsung Electronics plans to use ChatGPT and Codex for technical and non-technical work, across a broad range of functions, including software development, marketing, product development, and manufacturing, to enhance employee productivity and problem-solving capabilities,” according to a Monday announcement from OpenAI, which describes the deal as “one of our largest to date.”

Samsung Electronics employs over 100,000 people in South Korea.

OpenAI’s announcement points out that the company already collaborates with Samsung on memory chips. “With Samsung Electronics’ adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise, the relationship between the two companies is expanding beyond AI infrastructure to encompass workforce transformation and company-wide AI adoption,” the upstart enthused.

Jio heading for spaaaaace, and an IPO

Indian mega-telco Jio is contemplating its own constellation of broadband satellites.

“Jio is evaluating the development of a sovereign Low Earth Orbit satellite constellation for India,” chairman and managing director Mukesh D. Ambani wrote in a statement [PDF] made at its annual general meeting.

“We are also partnering with the leading global constellation providers by leasing satellite capacity, so that we can accelerate service availability while building our own long-term sovereign capability,” he said. “To anchor this ambition, Jio is also building its own ground station infrastructure in India. These ground stations will support our partner constellations, as well as our own future satellites, creating an end-to-end satellite broadband ecosystem from space to ground.”

The telco, which in a decade has become India’s largest by winning over half a billion subscribers, also revealed its intention to conduct an initial public offering.

Locally developed AI is also on the company’s agenda.

“Unlike global AI platforms that build in English and translate later, Jio is building AI natively in Indian languages,” Ambani said. “Be it a Marathi farmer or a Tamil student, both will get an AI that thinks and replies in their language.”

Vietnam decides to create ten of its own Big Tech companies

The government of Vietnam last week announced its intention to foster development of ten tech companies, each with revenue of $1 billion, by the year 2030.

Vietnam knows exactly what it wants these so-called “large-scale domestic strategic tech enterprises” to do, including deploying half a dozen new high-speed international submarine fiber-optic cables and rolling out 5G networks to 99 percent of the country's population.

Others get to “develop and improve digital platforms and shared databases that meet the needs of ministries, agencies, and localities to provide nationwide services, serving as a critical digital infrastructure for socio-economic development.”

All that work will require “at least five large-scale data centers that meet international and green standards, contributing to positioning Vietnam as a regional data hub.”

China’s digital currency finds 26 friends

Chinese authorities last week announced that 26 financial institutions have signed up to transact in the Digital Yuan, the Middle Kingdom’s central bank digital currency.

Per a state media report, “Standard Chartered China, as well as multiple Chinese-funded banks' branches in Thailand, Singapore, Laos and Qatar” have agreed to use the digital currency for cross-border transactions.

As the report points out, existing cross-border payment schemes can involve several intermediaries and take days. The institutions that signed up to use the Digital Yuan will apparently need only hours to settle things up.

China promotes its digital currency as a more efficient way to handle international payments than US-dollar-centric schemes like SWIFT. Signing 26 institutions therefore signals China continues to seek its own place in the international payments system.

More scandal at Australia's WiseTech

Things just keep getting weirder at Australian logistics tech company WiseTech Global, which saw its CEO Richard White depart amid claims of improper behavior and later investigated share trading that White conducted during a blackout period.

This week’s escalation saw Australian media allege that White had become the subject of a human trafficking investigation related to a former employee who needed a visa to remain in Australia. That allegation saw WiseTech issue a stock exchange filing [PDF] in which White unequivocally denied any involvement with human trafficking and WiseTech point out this is a matter for White to deal with in his capacity as a private citizen. ®