Lenovo Group Ltd said yesterday it will sell a basic personal computer aimed at China's vast but poor rural market and priced as low as US$199.
Lenovo's announcement follows rival Dell Inc's bid to boost its presence in China's booming market with the unveiling in March of a low-cost personal computer meant for novice Chinese users.
Beijing-based Lenovo, which acquired IBM Corp's PC division in 2005, is expanding abroad but is eager to maintain its dominance in China, where research firm Gartner Inc says PC sales grew by 23 percent last quarter.
"Our focus is to get down to the rural market," company spokesman Jay Chen said.
The new Lenovo unit will include a processor and a keyboard and will use a buyer's television set as a monitor, Chen said. He said he had no details on the processor size or other features.
The PC goes on sale later this year at 1,499 yuan to 2,999 yuan (US$199-US$399), Chen said.
Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, announced in March that it will sell a basic desktop PC designed for China and priced at US$223-US$515.
Some 800 million people live in China's countryside, where incomes average about 4,200 yuan a year.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained