In a regular series, Mobile World Live‘s Asia Editor Joseph Waring provides a regional roundup of news snippets:

Foxconn buys 1% share of Taiwan Mobile
Hon Hai Precision, better known as Foxconn, has bought close to a 1 per cent stake in Taiwan Mobile. The DigiTimes said the firm purchased 31.974 million shares for a 0.93 percent share, through a VC subsidiary.

China Mobile, DT form connected-car JV
China Mobile and Deutsche Telekom are reported to be working to form a joint venture to develop a connected car platform for the Chinese market. Reuters reported yesterday the two operators were due to sign an agreement today. The platform will run on China Mobile’s network and the German operator will contribute its M2M communications technology.

iPhone 6 Plus to account for 60% of sales
DigiTimes reports that the 6 Plus will account for 60 per cent of Apple’s new iPhone shipments worldwide and that Foxconn, which makes the 6 Plus, is hiring more workers to keep up with demand. The site also said the company is looking to reduce its dependence on Apple so is now looking to support low-cost smartphone makers in China.

ALU opens innovation centre in Tokyo
Alcatel-Lucent has opened a facility in Tokyo designed to give service providers and enterprise customers hands-on experience in co-creating new ultra-broadband and cloud-based services and applications. The company said the Tokyo facility will be able to conduct demos and interoperability tests via remote access to its central NFV competency centre outside of Chicago.

30M Indonesians go online with Opera Mini
More than 30 million Indonesians now use the Opera Mini browser to access the internet from their mobile phones. Its smartphone penetration in the country jumped to 26 per cent from 10 per cent a year ago.

The company said the number of Mini users on Android phones expanded 156 per cent over the last year while iOS users grew by 71 per cent and BlackBerry users were up 54 per cent. More than a quarter of its users are on Android.

Opera’s state of the mobile web report shows the average age of Mini users in Indonesia is 24, with 40 per cent still in school.

The country has more than 300 million mobile connections – a quarter of which are 3G, according to GSMA Intelligence.

CHT selects Coriant for backhaul upgrade
Chunghwa Telecom has selected Coriant to upgrade its mobile backhaul and LTE network using the vendor’s packet transport platform to keep up with the rising data demand from its 10 million subscribers. Coriant said the platform will allow the operator to cost-effectively migrate its current networks to a more cost-effective and efficient packet-based infrastructure, claimed it can reduce CAPEX by 40 per cent compared with router-centric (IP/MPLS-over-WDM) solutions.