With renewed tension and worries over cyberattacks reportedly emanating from state-sponsored entities in China, the new funding bill that passed the US Congress this week has a lot of provisions that ban government IT spending on Chinese technology. These sanctions effectively allow for the banning of buying federal computer and telecoms equipment from entities “owned, directed, or subsidized by the People’s Republic of China”.

This anti-China tech stance was spotted in the 574-page bill by lawyer Stewart A. Baker. TechCrunch notes that he’s the former assistant secretary in the US Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. In two posts by Baker (here and here), he unpacks the ramifications of these provisions and the damage they could do to Chinese firms like Lenovo (HKG:0992), ZTE (HKG:0763; SHE:000063), and Huawei. Indeed, Lenovo has previously been unscathed by recent alarm over potential backdoor surveillance in Chinese technology sold to overseas governments, perhaps because Lenovo’s gadgets are largely based on its IBM PC business acquisition.

Lenovo, notes TC’s Catherine Shu, is a major supplier to the US military, NASA, the Department of State, and the Department of Energy, not to mention Lenovo’s growth being dependent on taking market share from Dell and HP in American classrooms and local government offices.

Baker points out that China has played this protectionist game itself in the interests of national security, but Washington could still face World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests from Beijing:

While the provision doesn’t prohibit purchases of Chinese-government-influenced systems, it makes such purchases politically difficult. How will China react? Not well. China has spent years trying to curtail its own purchases of IT from outside its borders, but that won’t stop it from calling the bill protectionist and claiming a violation of US WTO obligations. Legally, China may have trouble making such a claim stick. China has not signed on to the WTO’s government procurement code; it is just an observer.

This bill could affect Chinese-brand PCs and telecoms equipment regardless of where they’re actually manufactured or developed in the world. Baker explains:

But China may not have to make the claim stick in its own right. That’s because the provision doesn’t hit China directly. Instead, it restricts purchases from Chinese-government-influenced entities, no matter where those entities manufacture their products. This means that the provision could prevent purchases of Lenovo computers manufactured in Germany, or Huawei handsets designed in Britain. Both of these countries have joined the WTO government procurement code, which obliges its members not to discriminate against other member countries in procuring data processing software and hardware. This means the US could see WTO challenges to the provision from its own allies (unless they’re so sick of Chinese hacking that they decide to emulate the new provision rather than attack it).

With Chinese cyberattacks allegedly traceable to a unit of its People’s Liberation Army, the nation might have no plausibly persuasive argument for Lenovo, Huawei, et al being trustworthy partners for sensitive tech equipment.

It’s a complex issue emerging from a massive bill, so Baker’s two posts deserve to be read closely to see how the Obama administration might enforce this – and how it might need to issue waivers for equipment that’s desperately needed. Plus, there’s always the risk of Chinese laws being swiftly crafted in retaliation.

(Via: TechCrunch)

The research firm Canalys has unveiled new data for Android shipments in Q4 2012. With Android now powering a third of all mobile phones shipped in that quarter, it’s especially notable that Android has helped China’s Huawei, ZTE (HKG:0763; SHE:000063), and Lenovo (HKG:0992) move into the top five among global smartphone makers.

Canalys tracked smartphone shipments in over 50 countries to conclude that the smartphone market grew 37 percent compared to the same time in 2011. Android is on 34 percent of all such phones around the world, with iOS on 11 percent of them.

There are actually four Chinese brands to look out for, as Canalys notes that Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo, and Coolpad (though the researchers used the “Yulong” (HKG:2369) parent company name) “all grew by triple-digit percentages.” As we noted recently, figures from Gartner have already told us that Coolpad (and Lenovo, ZTE, and Huawei) is outselling Apple’s iPhone within China. But that’s just within China. So CoolPad is mostly restricted to domestic sales, and is not in the worldwide top five.

Samsung still grew 78 percent globally according to today’s stats. Samsung was China’s top smartphone brand in 2012 as its Galaxy phone series, particularly the large-screen ones like the Note II, sold well. But Lenovo has plans to topple Samsung’s statue in China, with CEO Yang Yuanqing having recently declared that intention.

While Coolpad’s success is almost exclusively within China, its compatriot brands have successful overseas sales as well. Today’s report notes:

Huawei took third place for the first time in Q4 and ZTE fourth. As well as their home markets, they have been relatively successful in the US, where ZTE was fourth and Huawei fifth, driven by their portfolios of low-cost LTE smart phones. Even so, both vendors took less than 5 percent share each there.

Lenovo pushed out Sony to get into the top five. Here are the Q4 2012 global stats:

(Source: Canalys)

We reported last year that Chinese-brand smartphones make up 60 percent of sales in China, but Samsung remains the top brand. For now. Lenovo (HKG:0992) CEO Yang Yuanqing said this week that it’s “definitely our aspiration” to surpass Samsung (005930:KS) to become China’s top smartphone maker.

Yang put no timeframe on that aim. It could happen soon, as according to Canalys data last summer, Lenovo was China’s fastest growing smartphone brand in Q2 2012, increasing sales by 2,665 percent to stand as China’s third-biggest phone seller. ZTE was second. Samsung was top in China in both 2012 and 2011 thanks to its Galaxy S and SII phones along with a range of cheaper Android-powered options.

More recently, newer figures from Gartner showed that Lenovo had edged into second place in China. At the same time, Apple dropped to sixth position and the relatively unknown CoolPad brand rose to third.

It’s possible that Yang’s aspirations could be realised by the end of 2013.

The Lenovo boss voiced his thoughts during Wednesday’s earnings call with Chinese and international media. Amid all the talk of growing PC sales and doing well in the US, it’s worth remembering that Lenovo has strong mobile ambitions in its home country.

Keeping his options open, Yang also said that Lenovo “will assess whether we should launch [on] the Windows Phone” platform as well, joining rivals such as Samsung, HTC, ZTE, and Huawei in hedging their bets on Microsoft’s WP as well as Google’s Android.

Taiwan’s Digitimes Research believes that 189 million smartphones were sold in China in the final quarter of 2012, with 86 percent of those being Androids. It’s conceivable that 300 million smartphones will be sold in the country in 2013.

(Source: MorningWhistle)

That’s the most surprising finding in recent figures from Gartner which show that CoolPad’s Android-based phones have soared to third place in terms of the number of smartphones sold in China at the end of the previous year. CoolPad is one of four Chinese brands in the top six, a phenomenon we first noted last year when Canalys pointed out that domestic phone-makers now account for 60 percent of sales in China.

The CoolPad 8060, one of the phones now outselling the iPhone in China. (Image: ZOL.com.cn)

Going back to the Gartner numbers, China’s smartphone top six now looks like this:

• 1st - Samsung

• 2nd - Lenovo

• 3rd - CoolPad

• 4th - ZTE

• 5th - Huawei

• 6th - Apple

So how did CoolPad phones, made by the relatively tiny China Wireless Technologies (HKG:2369) which used to make PDAs and very unimaginative feature phones, manage to leap past the over-hyped and hallowed iPhone? And that’s despite Apple doubling iPhone sales in the country in 2012. As anyone following the progress of Android in China, you’ll have figured out how already. Android is one big reason, and price is the other. Basically, CoolPad is making a lot of serviceable – if not very trendy – phones for a mere 10 percent of the cost of an iPhone 5. The CoolPad 8060, for example, sells for just 500 RMB (US$80) unlocked, and is a highly affordable gateway to the smartphone world [1].

300 million smartphones to be sold in China in 2013

With smartphone sales at an estimated 189 million in China in 2012, and expected to reach 300 million by the end of 2013, Apple can no longer ignore the entry level market. To do so, some might say, would be to replicate the mistake of decades past that made Apple’s Mac OS into a fringe platform, dwarfed by the widely-used Windows. Apple might have an addressable market at the moment of a few hundred million Chinese middle-to-upper income individuals, but the larger potential market is people who can’t afford to pay out one, two, or three months’ salary for the current iPhone.

Although Apple would never go as low as CoolPad’s price points, there are rumors that Apple is pondering a lower-cost iPhone that could better help it battle Android in China and other important developing markets. Even if Apple aimed at half of the cost of the full iPhone, that would create a smaller iPhone priced at 2,500 RMB in China. That would at least put it closer to more well-specced Android devices in China (not CoolPad’s), such as the Xiaomi Mi2. The young phone-maker Xiaomi sold 7.19 million of its Android-powered phones in 2012, mostly to Chinese consumers.

In some ways, Xiaomi is the cool equivalent of CoolPad. While Xiaomi phones seem to be sold mostly to younger people, with 70 percent of them sold online, CoolPads are sold to a wider – and maybe less affluent – range of consumers from electronics retailers such as Gome and Suning.

CoolPad, then, represents the huge amount of people in China who’re ditching Nokia and feature phones, and jumping onto the cheapest thing that lets them play Temple Run 2. Apple needs to decide whether it wants to bring Xiaomi and CoolPad buyers closer to its price range, or forever push them – all half a billion of them – out of its exclusive club.

Late yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Chinese tech giant Lenovo is pondering an acquisition of Research in Motion (RIM), in a move that would presumably be aimed at boosting its own mobile business. “We are looking at all opportunities — RIM and many others,” Bloomberg quotes Lenovo CFO Wong Wai Ming as saying. RIM declined to comment.

The Bloomberg article highlights the potential security concerns that might be raised if RIM were bought by a Chinese company, but I think this would not pose a particularly large obstacle to Lenovo or to the acquisition. Huawei and ZTE have been getting a lot of heat over security in foreign countries, yes, but that’s rather different. Huawei has a CCP office in its headquarters, and ZTE’s founder is a former military officer. Both companies have done some pretty sketchy things in Iran. Lenovo, on the other hand, is kicking ass globally with PCs already, and its computers are in more than a few corporate offices as-is, so it’s hard to see why their purchase of RIM would really become a big security sticking point. Are RIM’s networks really carrying any more sensitive data than all the Lenovo PCs in corporate offices around the globe already?

With that said, I must admit that I don’t really get it. Lenovo is making great progress in the mobile sector with its smartphone offerings, while RIM is losing ground even in traditional strongholds like Indonesia. True, RIM and the Blackberry platform are popular with the corporate crowd, so Lenovo may be interested in that market. That said, I still don’t get it, so I’d like to open up the floor to you, dear readers: what am I missing here? Why would Lenovo be interested in buying RIM? Is this a brilliant idea that I’m just not getting?

(via Bloomberg)

Taiwan’s Digitimes Research has a new report out looking at the smartphone landscape in mainland China. It states that sales of smartphones in China – across all platforms, like iPhone and Android – are expected to grow 137 percent year-on-year to 189 million devices in 2012.

It’s expected that 86 percent of fourth quarter sales in China will be Android phones (with 50.8 million Androids sold in Q4). For the year as a whole, that amounts to an impressive 157 million Android smartphones sold in China during the whole year, which is up 260 percent from a year ago.

The new report also signals a shift towards Chinese consumers favoring domestic smartphone brands, with local brands expected to account for 61 percent of China’s smartphone market in 2012 led by Lenovo. That syncs with Canalys data we saw last month which pointed out that China’s top five smartphone brands are, in descending order, Samsung, Lenovo, CoolPad, Huawei, and ZTE. That’s very bad news for the once-beloved HTC; as for other overseas phone-makers, only Samsung and Apple appear to be making a strong showing this year.

This all seems to be on a par with what Canalys said earlier this year. It found that China “accounted for 27 percent of the 158 million global smartphone shipments” back in Q2 alone.

[Source: Digitimes and Digitimes Research]

Chinese search giant Baidu is apparently continuing its trend of working with other tech companies to produce its branded phones. After partnerships with Dell and Changhong, among others, Baidu has teamed up with Lenovo to announce the new LePhone A586. Priced at 999 RMB ($158) when purchased through Lenovo’s official site, the handset looks set to compete with the many other internet-company-branded phones that have flooded into the market over the last six months. Sales of the phone will begin on December 12.

The handset has been custom designed by Lenovo and features a high-performance Qualcomm chip. Its operating system is based on Baidu’s cloud platform, but apparently it’s not regular Baidu Yi; rather, it’s a custom OS built on Android 4.0 that has some cool new features like voice unlocks. It has a 4.5 inch touchscreen with 5 million pixels and comes with a built-in camera that can shoot HD video.

There are lots of cheap handsets out there, of course, but not many of them are running Android 4.0-based operating systems at present, so that may be a draw for some buyers. I also suspect that with Lenovo — a trusted hardware company — behind the helm, this phone will hold some appeal beyond people who just want to buy a branded phone from their favorite internet company. (Do those people actually exist? Lots of Chinese internet companies seem to think they do; I’m not convinced). Plus, at $150, it’s a lot cheaper than some of its strongest competitors, like the Xiaomi Mi2 at more than $300.

[via Sina Tech]

There are already a few ways to get into your Android device in a secure way: face recognition, a passcode, or a grid pattern. And now there’s one more smartphone safeguard – voice recognition. This was partly created by China’s Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), who call it “speaker verification” to create a “voiceprint,” and so far it can be found only in the Lenovo A586 phone (pictured) that launches today in China.

This voiceprint unlock feature was jointly created by Baidu and the Singapore-based A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research, at their Baidu-I2R Research Centre (BIRC) that we saw established in the lion state in February of this year.

Click to enlarge.

‘Speaker verification’ sounds like a nice way to securely lock down your Android phone so that only you can get into it. I’ve tried face recognition on Android, but it comes with the issue of low light, and it doesn’t always spot who you are. Hopefully vocal identification will solve that, though it might be a pain on noisy city streets.

The Lenovo A586 is dubbed the LePhone A586 in China. Lenovo (HKG:0992) is performing very well with its Android-based smartphones in its native China, seeing sales up 44-fold in the year from Q1 2011 to Q1 2012. Indeed, domestic smartphone makers are trampling across the graves of feature phones with glee, and homegrown phone brands now account for 60 percent of China’s smartphone market.

Dr. Li Haizhou, co-director of BIRC, described this voiceprint roll-out as “a strong endorsement of user-inspired research and cutting-edge speech and language technology in I2R and BIRC.” I2R’s executive director, Dr. Tan Geok Leng, added:

Lenovo A586’s adoption of the Speaker Verification technology that is developed through our joint effort with Baidu demonstrates I2R’s commitment to translate their expertise in speech and language technologies into products that benefits consumers and the industry. It is indeed encouraging that an A*STAR-developed technology is being deployed in China, the largest and world’s fastest growing smartphone market.

Some popular domestic-brand phones.

Over the past couple of years, Chinese companies have been cranking out smartphones like clockwork while global brands like Nokia and LG have busied themselves with losing market share left and right. The result, according to research firm Canalys, is that as of Q3 2012, domestic brands account for 60 percent of China’s smartphone market.

The top five smartphone brands are Samsung, Lenovo, CoolPad, Huawei, and ZTE according to the research firm. Samsung is a Korean company, of course, but the other companies are all domestic brands.

Whether this trend will continue is anyone’s guess. Lenovo’s recent performance would seem to be an indication of growing Chinese dominance, as its mobile division has been kicking ass recently. ZTE, on the other hand, is bleeding staffers and money, and cutbacks to the mobile department (or straight-up bankruptcy) could lie in the company’s future.

[via Sina Tech]

Yesterday Lenovo released its Q2 financials, which are available in shiny powerpoint form here for anyone interested. Among the rest of the generally favorable news, Lenovo notes that it is doing pretty well in the smartphone market, with smartphone volume growth up 18 times compared the previous year. The company claims it has also become the number two smartphone brand in China, commanding a 14.2 percent market share.

Desktops and notebooks still account for the vast majority of Lenovo’s business, accounting for more than 85 percent of the company’s revenue during Q2. But in addition to smartphone growth, the company has also seen success with its tablets, and currently holds the number two spot (by market share) in the Chinese tablet market. At present, mobile devices account for less than nine percent of Lenovo’s total revenue, but that number is climbing fast.

Lenovo revenue breakdown. (MIDH refers to revenue from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets)

It will be interesting to see how far this trend carries itself. Will Lenovo take the route of Apple and become a phone company that also makes a few computers? It’s clear that the company isn’t about to give up its massive desktop and notebook revenues just yet, and I’m of the opinion that the traditional computer is not about to be totally replaced by mobile devices anyway. But with mobile and smartphone growth moving so quickly, it’s hard to imagine Lenovo’s focus isn’t shifting a bit towards the mobile sector when the company makes its future plans.

China’s Lenovo (HKG:0992) has passed HP (NYSE:HPQ) to become the world’s leading PC maker in 2012 Q3, according to research firm Gartner. HP has held top spot in the industry since 2006, but Lenovo has been edging closer in recent years – noticeably and dramatically boosting its market share since early 2011.

But another research firm, IDC, begs to differ and reckons that HP holds the lead for now by the slim margin of just 0.2 percent – 15.7 percent for HP, 15.5 percent to Lenovo.

Lenovo, however, takes the throne of a shrinking kingdom. Global PC shipments fell 8.3 percent last quarter from the same point a year ago. Here’s Gartner’s top five:

We usually follow IDC’s data on this blog, so this is the updated scene from their numbers:

[Download image version of chart]

Speaking of Asia-Pacific, IDC said:

The region continued to contract on a year-on-year basis, though growing sequentially from 2Q12. China was mostly on target but the rest of the region came in below expectations as ongoing economic sluggishness and competing device distractions weighed on PC spending this quarter.

While it’s a major milestone for Lenovo, which bought IBM’s PC business back in 2004, the larger battle for the firm will be to transition to the next wave of computing with its smartphones, tablets, and hybrid touchscreen laptops – such as the ThinkPad Edge Twist Windows 8 device that was debuted yesterday. Lenovo also has Android-powered phones and tablets, and is said to be China’s second-largest mobile brand.

HP is in more of a pickle, having killed off its own mobile OS and platform, WebOS, last year – and so has no mobile gadgets to offer. HP’s new-ish CEO Meg Whitman warned analysts recently that there’ll be no real recovery or expansion in its business until 2014. The launch of Windows 8 might give HP a boost in the final quarter – unless consumers decide they prefer Lenovo’s offerings. Note that HP has said today that it prefers IDC’s numbers because they include workstation sales.

Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) remains in third place, says Gartner, though its share of PC shipments dropped to 10.5 percent from 11.2 percent a year earlier.

[Sources: Gartner, IDC; via Bloomberg]

IDC Japan: 2H 2012 PC market share for Japan

According to Marbridge Daily, Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo (HKG:0992) announced in Japan yesterday that it has become the leading vendor in the Japanese market. Ostensibly, Lenovo is citing IDC Japan 2H 2012 figures that were released earlier this month that put its market share at 25.4 percent.

This comes one year after Lenovo paid $175 million (in shares) to NEC for a 51 percent stake in the subsequent NEC Lenovo Japan Group joint venture. Prior to their agreement, NEC held about 20 percent of the market, while Lenovo had about 5.6 percent. So technically, they are holding steady in the market.

But in comparison to its competitors, standing still is actually moving forward. Market runner-up Fujitsu dropped 8.7 percent on the previous year (15.3 percent), as did HP and Dell, dropping 8.8 and 9.8 percent respectively on the year before. Toshiba, interestingly, fared well growing 2.3 percent on the previous year.

Lenovo has been active in Japan since 2005, and IBM (who it acquired in 2005) has been selling PCs in the country since back in the 80s.

It was recently announced that Lenovo’s new Thinkpad XI Carbon (pictured below) will be hitting Japan soon, giving fans there a very sexy Ultrabook option.

The world is going mobile, and Lenovo is going with it even as it is also moving closer to being the world’s biggest maker of desktop and laptop computers. The company has always found a ready market at home in China — as evidenced by its latest financial report — and its smortphone offerings are doing well too. In fact, sales of Lenovo phones in China for the first quarter of this year were forty-four times what they were in Q1 2011. I’ll just let you reflect on that for a second.

In fact, Lenovo’s amazing phone numbers have pushed its market share into double digits in China’s smartphone market for the first time ever. The company boasted an 11.2 percent share of the market as of the end of Q1, and the number is probably higher by now.

That said, Lenovo’s smartphones do face some serious challengers in China’s crop of cheap-but-powerful smartphones, the latest of which is either the Xiaomi M2 or some Qihoo 360 thing Zhou Hongyi just made up. Given that a lot of these mobile makers are, at least supposedly, selling their phones at no profit or even at a loss, Lenovo may be facing a still challenge in the long term.

[Shenzhen Business News via Sina Tech]

New ThinkPad X131e Laptop

Last month we cited figures from IDC which indicated that Chinese PC maker Lenovo (HKG:0992) is poised to we pass Hewlett Packard as the global leader in PC shipments sometime this year [1]. And now today the company’s first quarter report gives further indications that Lenovo is a company on the rise.

Key metrics for the company include its record marketshare of 15 percent, as well as quarterly sales of over $8 billion, up 35 percent from the same time the previous year. Operating profit was up to $182 million, up 48 percent from the year before, although profit margins are still behind its competition. The company’s CEO, Yang Yuanqing noted in the announcement:

Our businesses in emerging markets outside of China, our consumer business and MIDH business all achieved rapid expansion, providing the balanced pillars to support our overall performance. Our business in China and our global commercial business maintained strong profitability, which allows us to secure plenty of resources to invest in growth areas and ensure the company’s overall healthy performance.

Indeed, the company’s sales in China were up 24 percent accounting for a remarkable 44 percent of its worldwide sales, as well as 35 percent market share in the PC space. It held the number one spot in Japan as well with 25.4 percent market share, thanks to its joint venture with NEC, putting it well ahead of its nearest competitor Fujitsu at 15.3 percent.

As for the US market, Lenovo is still far behind Hewlett Packard, but has aspirations of taking a big bite out of the PC space there as well. The company is also making progress in the mega-markets of India and Brazil as well. It will be interesting to see how the PC wars will look a year from now, because Lenovo looks to be on a far different path than the competition.

Photo: news.mydrivers.com

According to new figures from Chinese research firm Analysys International, Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad is doing very, very well in China’s tablet space. For the second quarter of 2012, iPads accounted for 72.6 percent of the entire tablet market, which is up 20 percent on the previous quarter (see interactive chart below).

The folks over at iDownload Blog point out that Apple’s global share of the tablet space was about 68.2 percent for Q2, citing recent numbers from IDC.

Analysys notes, of course, that Apple’s third generation (aka ‘new’) iPad went on sale in China in the second quarter, so sales leading up to that would have been slower.

Interestingly, Chinese manufacturer Lenovo (HKG:0992) snagged the second spot behind Apple, accounting for 8.38 percent of the tablet market. It was followed by eBen eRen (who I confess, I’ve never heard of) at 3.63 percent, and then Samsung with a surprisingly low share at 3.59 percent.

Download image version of chart

New ThinkPad X131e Laptop

According to a Bloomberg report today, Chinese PC maker Lenovo (HKG:0992) is going after Dell’s share of government and education sales in the US.

Earlier this year we saw Lenovo reap the rewards of a government contract in India, which helped them overtake Hewlett Packard [1] in that market by leaping to 14.9 percent market share, up on 9.7 percent for the same time the year before. So if it can do something similar in the US, it can only mean good things for its already growing business there.

The afore-mentioned report cites Lenovo’s North American vice president and general manager, Thomas Looney, as claiming that the company can grow more than 20 percent a year in sales to education and government institutions.

Indeed Lenovo is pushing hard for the American market, recently landing a three-year sponsorship deal with the National Football League, becoming the official laptop, desktop and workstation sponsor for the organization – and likely getting lots of important TV air time during games.

Looking at recent trends in PC market share in the United States, Lenovo was the only top five manufacturer to show positive yearly growth in IDC’s recent second quarter report, with a 6.1 percent jump from a year before to hold 8 percent of the market. In contrast, leader HP was down 12 percent, although it still holds a commanding lead with almost 26 percent of the market.

It has been another record-breaking quarter of smartphone sales in China with more than 42 million shipped in the country in Q2 2012. That’s from the newest report by the analysts Canalys. That represents 199 percent year-on-year growth in smartphone sales in China, and 32 percent up on the previous quarter.

Canalys also notes that:

China accounted for 27 percent of the 158 million global smartphone shipments, compared to 16 percent for the United States.

Samsung (005930:KS) remained the top smartphone vendor in China with 17 percent market share of sales. (Backing up web impressions stats we looked at last year showing that Chinese consumers love the Samsung Galaxy SII). But it can’t be complacent, as its sales were pretty flat. In second-, third, and fourth-place are, respectively, ZTE, Lenovo, and Huawei – all local brands. Lenovo saw astonishing 2,665 growth in shipments – but then it’s always easier to improve on a previously crappy performance. Apple fell to fifth place despite being up 102 percent year-on-year. HTC grew 389 percent, mainly on the back of its new Desire V phones which look to be replicating the success of the first Desire model. Nokia and Motorola both fell sharply.

Here’s all that condensed into our one simple graphic for China [1]:

The one primary winner among all this is Android, Google’s mobile OS, which is now on 68 percent of all smartphones sold globally. Apple’s iOS, by contrast, is on just 26 million of them.

Samsung is on top worldwide with “over 45 million” smartphones sold – that’s 35 percent of the pie. Apart from Taiwan’s HTC, no Chinese brands cracked the top five. Yet. Interestingly, that differs from IDC recent report for the same period that declares ZTE a new-comer in the global top five smartphone brands.

[Source: Canalys; via TechCrunch]

Photo: AP via The Hindu

Lenovo is the world’s second-biggest PC company (and it’s got its eyes on the number one spot), but even that sort of success may not insulate some of its line workers from downsizing if rumors first reported in Taiwanese media and now being repeated in Chinese tech media prove true. Although the source of these reports is not clear and they should thus be treated with extreme skepticism, word on the street is that Lenovo is looking to shut down a manufacturing plant in Shenzhen to save on labor costs, moving operations that had previously been in Shenzhen to Sichuan and Anhui.

When contacted for comment, a spokesman for Lenovo categorically denied the rumors:

While we typically don’t respond to rumors, I will tell you that we have no plans to close our manufacturing plant in Shenzhen. Our Shenzhen facility is a key part of our supply chain and we continue to be very proud of the work we do there, which includes the production of our renown ThinkPad laptops for our customers worldwide.

The rumored problem was that workers’ salaries are slightly higher in Shenzhen than they are even in highly developed cities like Shanghai. According to anonymous “suppliers” — again, take this with a grain of salt or three — an average Shanghai worker makes 1450 RMB/month ($230), whereas workers in Shenzhen make 1500 RMB ($238). Salaries in less-developed Sichuan and Anhui are even lower, and when multiplied by thousands of workers over months or years, Lenovo’s potential savings would not be insignificant.

The rumored move is also being explained in part as a reaction to a shift in the marketplace, where prefabricated desktop PCs are being increasingly replaced by laptops or by custom-built machines that Lenovo and other PC makers can’t profit from. Needless to say, laptop and tablet manufacturing requires different skills and equipment than desktop manufacturing, and a restructuring move could make sense given that some of Lenovo’s newer plants, like the recently-invested-in Wuhan base, are better equipped to handle manufacturing mobile devices.

[via Sina Tech]

This post was updated at 03:16 to include an official statement from Lenovo.

Sino’s Q1 report shows that at that time, Lenovo controlled 8.8 percent of China’s total mobile market, which put it in a tie for third place with Huawei. But just three months later, this new data is showing that Lenovo has rocketed past Huawei and Nokia to take second place with 11 percent of the overall market. Samsung remains the leader. We’ve taken the liberty of putting the new Sino data into an interactive chart and comparing it with the Q1 report so you can see what’s changed:

As evidenced by the chart above, Lenovo’s ascendance came along with big drops in market share from both Nokia and Samsung. Nokia’s downward spiral shouldn’t surprise anyone, and Samsung’s also makes sense given that its highly-priced smartphones are facing increasing competition in China from inexpensive domestic competitors.

Of course, Lenovo has to deal with those competitors, too, and there may be more details or mitigating factors that we’re not aware of because Sino Market Research hasn’t released the full report on its website yet. If you take the numbers at face value, though, it looks like Lenovo had a pretty impressive quarter.

Yang Yuanqing distributed $3 million from his bonus among 10,000 junior-level employees, the China-based technology company confirmed Thursday. The employees, such as receptionists, production-line workers and assistants, each received an average bonus of 2,000 yuan, which is $314, in the name of their CEO.

This is awesome, and it’s also pretty unexpected in an era when even the heads of companies that have utterly failed (cough, investment banks) seem to feel they’re personally entitled to massive bonuses as their lower-level workers get screwed. Lenovo, on the other hand, is experiencing unprecedented success, and it’s telling that Yang has chosen to pass much of his own bonus on to the junior-level employees his company would be nothing without. It’s great to see Yang acknowledging that Lenovo’s success is the result of everyone’s hard work and that by extension everyone should get to enjoy some of the reward.

A cynic might point out that Yang also kept $2.2 million for himself, and that the whole thing seems a bit like a publicity stunt. To that I respond: who cares? If tech CEOs start believing that the best way to get positive publicity for themselves and their companies is by giving bonuses to lower-level employees, is that something we want to discourage? Even if Yang conceived of this gift as an entirely self-serving publicity stunt, I could not care less. I’m pretty sure the junior-level employees getting the bonuses don’t care much either.

And yes, Yang could certainly have been more generous (and other CEOs have taken this even farther), but complaining that he only gave away $3 million is a bit like looking a gift horse in the mouth. Shut up about the teeth, you idiot, that horse is worth $3 million!

The reason I’m so enamored with Yang’s generosity is that China specifically (and more generally the world) needs displays like this to remind people that success is a team sport. It is easy, I think, to get to the top and then convince oneself retroactively that you got there without help. But you didn’t. I don’t care who you are or what your story is, nobody is successful in anything without at least a little help from others. In tech, especially, we tend to credit a company’s successes or failings to the machinations of its executives and forget that policy decisions aren’t the only things that matter. All the clever strategizing in the world can’t save a product that’s shoddily assembled, and even the most successful companies wouldn’t get very far without someone there to answer the phones and direct calls to the right places.

So here’s to Yang Yuanqing, whose $3 million gift will hopefully inspire other CEOs to remember that they succeed only with the help and the hard work of all those working with them.

[Image via CNN]

Earlier this year we noted that according to IDC figures, Lenovo is already shipping the most PCs in the Asia region by a large margin. While Lenovo (with 14.9 percent market share) sits just behind global leader HP (15.5 percent) it’s interesting to take a look back and see how it got there. I’ve isolated the two companies in the interactive chart below so you can get a better picture. As you can see, the most recent quarter has seen Lenovo and HP converge, with Lenovo poised to overtake them in the next quarter.

[Download image version of this chart]

Reuters points out that Lenovo’s joint venture with Japanese manufacturer NEC (January 2011) as well as its acquisition of German consumer electronics maker Medion (June 2011) has helped its progress. But the report also notes that Lenovo’s profit margins at 1.4 percent are lower than HP and Dell (7.4 and 6.2 percent respectively) for the most recent quarter.

It’s also important to note that Lenovo announced earlier this month that it would be investing $30 million into a manufacturing and distribution center in Brazil. And progress in that large market will certainly help Lenovo in the PC wars since Brazil was the world’s third largest PC market in 2011.

Disclosure: As per our ethics policy, I should note that I’m a former HP employee.

A few weeks back we told you about how Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten was venturing into the very big, and very attractive Brazilian market. Brazil has over 79 million internet users out of an overall population of 203 million. Well the lure of that market is by no means restricted to e-commerce, as Chinese PC maker Lenovo (HKG:0992) has also recently expressed great interest in the country’s market.

To that end, the company is also interested in establishing a manufacturing base in Brazil. Its motives are ostensibly similar to the reasons why Apple invested in producing iPads in the South American nation, as avoiding high import tariffs would let Lenovo sell PCs at lower prices.

Lenovo is already doing very well in some of the world’s biggest markets. It is the leading PC maker in Asia, being the leading supplier in China, and (as of just recently) it is also the leading PC manufacturer in India as well.

MarketWatch cites the company’s president for Asia Pacific and Latin America, Milko Van Duijl, as saying, “We are interested in buying or working with all the players (in Brazil), though we are not singling out any one of them.”

Lenovo is poised to overtake HP as the world’s leading PC maker in terms of market share sometime this year.

[Via MarketWatch]

Photo: 360buy

There have been numerous reports out there today that Lenovo is going to announce its Intel-powered, Android-rocking smartphone, the K800, in the next few days. But any shoppers out there who are eager to get their hands on it might have noticed that the much-anticipated handset is already available for pre-order right now on 360buy.com.

Headlining the hardware specs, of course, is the 1.6 GHz Intel Medfield processor. After Lava International launched its Xolo X900 smartphone in India just over a month ago, the K800 is the second smartphone in the world to be powered by an Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) processor, and the first one for Chinese consumers. It has a 4.5-inch 720 x 1280 HD display, and an 8 megapixel camera on the on the back, with a 1.3 megapixel camera around front.

It is currently priced at 3,299 RMB, or about $520 over on 360Buy.com.

It will be interesting if the K800 can find a niche to settle into though, with high-profile smartphones like the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy already out there. Will consumers see it as an attractive alternative at that mid- to higher-end price point?

[Via PCpop]

Lenovo jumped to take 14.9 percent of the market for Q1 2012, way up from the 9.7 percent that it held in the same period one year before (see chart below). The report notes that consumer buying was actually down three percent on the previous quarter, and Lenovo’s leap was largely due to a large contract with the Tamil Nadu government for 912,000 laptops, which was won by Lenovo, HCL, and Acer.

Following Lenovo in second spot was Dell, which dropped from the top position the year before. It now holds 14.0 percent of the market, just ahead of HP which has 13.7. Acer and HCL round out the top five with 11.8 and 5.8 percent respectively.

Of course HP is still the global leader in PC shipments, but Lenovo is expected to steal that crown during the second or third quarter of this year. HP, as you have likely heard by now, is planning to cut 27,000 jobs by 2014 in an effort to turn around the company.

*Disclosure: I’m a former HP employee (see our ethics policy), as well as a former Thinkpad owner.

Download image version of chart

I failed miserably. Not only could I not find anywhere that sold the CT510, I couldn’t even find anyone who had heard of it.

My first stop was a large electronics mall on Beijing’s east side. This mall has a cluster of console gaming shops in its basement that are pretty well-stocked, and I figured there was a good chance one of them might have the CT510. No such luck. In the seven shops I checked, there was not a single CT510 to be found, nor had any of the shopkeepers I spoke to even heard of the device. My conversations with them all went something like this:

Me: “Do you have the CT510?”
Shopkeeper: “…the what?”
Me: “The CT510. It’s the domestic game console eedoo developed, have you heard of it?”
Shopkeeper: “No, I’ve never heard of that…”
Me: “Have any customers asked you about it?”
Shopkeeper: “No.”

One of the shopkeepers thought there was a chance I might find the device upstairs (after I explained to him what it was), on one of the other levels of the mall. I wandered the four floors, asking around, and found everything from iPhones to gaming PCs to surveillance camera systems, but no trace of the CT510. When I asked about it, all I got were blank stares.

Perhaps this is an isolated incident, I thought, so I headed to central Beijing. There’s a strip of shops near the old Drum and Bell Towers that’s well known for selling consoles; it’s where net users will often point you if you ask online where to buy consoles and console games in Beijing. A few of the shops there were closed for the holiday, but I checked all four that were open. Once again, none of them carried the CT510, and none of the people working there knew what it was. In the last shop, for example, I spoke with a wide-eyed shop owner who was sure I was just confused:

Me: “Do you have the CT510?”
Shopkeeper: “The what?”
Me: “The CT510.”
Shopkeeper: “Do you mean CD? We have some CDs.”
Me: “No, the CT510, it’s the domestic game console that just came out. It used to be called the iSec.”
Shopkeeper: “Oh…no. We don’t have that. I haven’t heard of that.”

I was beginning to wonder if I had somehow gotten the launch date wrong. Could it be that I was just early, and that the CT510 hadn’t actually come out yet? I double-checked eedoo’s site, but the launch date is right there on the front page: April 29.

What about e-tailers, I wondered. Would I have better luck finding the console online? Slightly. I did find the CT510 on Amazon — although for some reason you can’t order it until May 3 — but searches on 360Buy, Tmall, and Taobao all came up empty. The closest I came was a kind of heat lamp that apparently shares the “CT510″ moniker.

The fact that the device isn’t available on Taobao seems the most damning, given that in-demand electronics are generally available on that site weeks before they’re even released. Could interest in this thing be so low that no one on Taobao thinks it’s even worth selling?

Apparently, the answer is yes. There’s very little discussion of eedoo’s console online, but what I did find was overwhelmingly negative. In this poll on Sina Weibo, for example, less than seven percent of nearly 2,000 respondents said they would buy the console. And in this forum thread about the console (one of the first Baidu search results for “CT510″), the question “Would you buy it?” was met with responses that range from skepticism to derision and curse words. A sampling:

I still don’t support this thing.

This thing is dead.

This won’t last long, it will disappear on its own.

The price is disappointing…

This product is just too weak, no need to mention anything else, all I have to say is the goddamn 3799 RMB ($600) price tag.

Only an idiot would buy this.

To borrow a classical phrase, this thing has brought about its own destruction [with the high price].

At this price, its chances of success are about the same as the chances the world is about to end.

I hope it’s successful…

[I'll answer with] an English phrase: “Go to hell.”

I wouldn’t buy this even if it was only 799 RMB ($126). Do you think Chinese people are idiots?

Lenovo is so stupid. They do everything, but they don’t do anything well.

Lenovo is a stakeholder in eedoo, and it incubated eedoo before eedoo’s eventual launch as an independent company, but Lenovo has been backing away from any association with the CT510 for months, and it isn’t hard to see why.

Eedoo seems to have launched a product that no one wants. I suppose the upside of that is that it won’t be too much of a problem that the thing is also impossible to find, but with millions in R&D costs — and who knows how much spent developing titles in collaboration with third parties — eedoo certainly seems like it may be at the bottom of a very deep hole.

I still hope to get a chance to play the CT510 someday, but I’m not any more interested in paying $600 than any of those Chinese gamers quoted above. I have contacted eedoo to ask if I could get some hands-on time with the console, and also to ask them to respond to some of my questions about the system and its marketing strategy, but I haven’t heard anything back.

Intel’s (NASDAQ:INTC) new China chairman, Sean Maloney (pictured right), took to a live chat with Chinese netizens yesterday to explain how the company is focusing on the “incredible” growth in China, and how it’s developing mobile-oriented and lower-powered processors to power Android and Windows 8 mobile devices. Sean emphasised: “Our strategy in China now is to win with smartphones and tablets.”

Speaking via an interpreter, the new Intel China chief also spoke of his recent move to Beijing, his recovery from serious illness, and joked that his kids are learning Chinese a lot quicker than him. Anyone on Weibo could submit questions, and they elicited some straight-forward answers from Sean. When asked about Intel’s new push into mobile processors, he outlined the US company’s competitive advantages:

The smartphone and tablet growth is stunning. However, there are fewer and fewer companies in the industry can continue to deliver Moore’s Law in a sustainable business model. Intel is on top of the list.

Intel’s first partner for its new Medfield chip is China’s Lenovo (HKG:0992), which will launch the K800 Android smartphone and IdeaPad K2110 tablet (pictured below) later this summer. Medfield is a lower-powered, Atom-based processor. Sean explained to netizens:

Medfield inside: Lenovo's upcoming IdeaPad K2110 tablet (image source: The Verge). Click to enlarge.

Latest Intel mobile CPU sets remarkable industry benchmarks, like power-consumption, browsing and Java performance. Power consumption we had got down a really low level, we will get the power down even more in next generation.

During the Weibo chat, Sean also referenced other new chips on the horizon for Intel, with an emphasis on getting tinier:

Next year we will do 22nm [nanometers; Intel’s Ivy Bridge already is 22nm], and we will do 14nm soon after. We are passionate about doing the smallest products that are available. We also have a large team of software engineers on Android […] Smartphone and tablet growth has been amazing, driven by video, SNS, gaming. This requires strong processing power and this is where Intel’s silicon strengths come into play.

A question from a blog dedicated to Windows Phone prompted Sean to say that Intel’s “only focus in smartphone is Android,” thereby ruling out a Medfield-powered WP7 or WP8 phone in the near future. On tablets the upcoming chip will be put to work for both Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows 8.

Intel’s Sean also repeatedly mentioned notebooks and ultrabooks, and how they cannot be ignored or sidelined:

Remember, Notebooks are still growing well. Not many people choose a notebook because of service provider’s offerings. I believe that the notebooks and the tablets are very complementary.

And added:

I’m really optimistic about the potential of the ultrabook. It is not just another product. In the future, ultrabooks will become the majority of all [notebooks]. It is not meant to be high-end only. It will come down over time.

Sean will be back in action tomorrow and Thursday at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing.

The chat session is archived on this Weibo Talk page; or follow Sean Maloney on Weibo.

Lenovo (HKG:0992) has unveiled a promo video for its new IdeaTab S2109 tablet over on its YouTube Channel. While there’s still no reference to the device on its website (as far as I can see) it certainly looks like a quality device, although the pricing or release date is still a mystery.

The 8.9mm-thin tablet will sport a 9.7-inch IPS display, making it the same size as the iPad – and thus, a pretty direct competitor [1]. Other notable features include 10-hour battery life, micro USB, micro HDMI, a microSD card slot, and quad speakers. As far as software goes, the S2109 will be able to access both Google Play and the Lenovo app shop. It will run on the latest version of Android, version 4.0.

It’s good to see Lenovo exploring the tablet and mobile spaces, in addition to its successful PC business. We have yet to really see any really intriguing offerings from its main competitors Dell and HP [2], or at least, I haven’t been intrigued by them yet.

The Android vs iOS tablet debate is ongoing, with PC Mag providing an excellent comparison a few weeks back, making a very strong case that Android apps still have a long way to go to match those on the iPad.

You can check out Lenovo’s demo video for the S2109 IdeaTab below.

[Notebook Italia via Slashgear]

...and what about iCloud?

Chinese PC maker Lenovo (HKG:0992) and cloud storage service SugarSync recently announced that they would partner to create an integrated storage solution for Lenovo PCs and tablets. According to the announcement, the service will be available on ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops, as well as Android tablets outside of China.

That last note is an interesting one though. I’m not certain why China is excluded from having this service, especially given that Lenovo is a Chinese company [1]. But my guess is that if SugarSync was ever blocked (my colleague Steven says it hasn’t been so far), then Lenovo would have a LOT of unsatisfied customers in its home market.

Dropbox, another cloud storage service, has been blocked for about as long as I can remember. Surprisingly though, Digitimes reports that Acer is bringing its cloud storage service (AcerCloud) to both North America and Greater China next month.

It’s an interesting point to consider though. Services like Google Docs and Dropbox, which allow users to create impromptu websites, have been used in the past to get sensitive news out of China – and this might be part of the reason why those services are currently blocked. SugarSync also allows for similar file sharing and could be used for a similar purpose.

We already knew that things were looking up for Chinese PC maker Lenovo (HKG:0992) this past year when the company surpassed rival Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) for the number two spot in global PC shipments, just behind HP. And now Lenovo is reporting a few new milestones now that its third fiscal quarter results are in.

While the company holds its highest ever global market share at 14.0 percent, much of Lenovo’s success can be chalked up to strong performance in its own backyard. The manufacturer claims a dominant market share in China at 35.3 percent. Meanwhile in India, shipments were up 28 percent to reach yet another record share of 13.7 percent, while the company’s joint venture with NEC helped it’s business in Japan. All this has helped its third quarter profit jump 54 percent over the same time the previous year.

To get an idea for how well the Lenovo has performed here in Asia specifically, we took a look at figures from IDC’s Asia/Pacific Quarterly PC Tracker Report. As you can see by playing the animation below, its performance in 2011 really sets it apart from its main competitors in the region, Acer (TPE:2353) and Dell. HP (NYSE:HPQ), while dominating globally, does not perform quite as well in Asia.

The Hanvon C18, left, and Lenovo K91 Smart TV on the right - both brand-new gadgets for 2012 which use Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor.

Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), the America-based mobile chip maker, has said that China now accounts for 32 percent of its revenue, more than any other Asian nation. The figure comes from financial data for the fiscal year 2011, revealed by CEO Paul Jacobs.

Its revenue in the last fiscal year hit US$14.96 billion – up 36 percent on 2010’s total – as yet more people bought smartphones, many of which are powered by Qualcomm’s chips. These include the 1GHz Snapdragon that’s inside Samsung’s (005930:KS) Galaxy S, which was China’s most popular Android smartphone last year.

But that 32 percent stat for China actually comes down to local manufacturers, not regular consumers like you and I. Qualcomm disclosed that it has 80 Chinese partners making use of its technology, and it brought on board 20 new licensees in 2011. These include the likes of ZTE (HKG:0763; SHE:000063) and Huawei – both of whom saw huge growth in their smartphone shipments in 2011 – and numerous other phone makers in the country.

At the recent CES 2012 in Las Vegas, there was a wealth of China-brand gadgets powered by Qualcomm chips, such as the Hanvon C18 (an e-reader/tablet crossover) and the Lenovo (HKG:0992) K91 Smart TV (both pictured top). Notice that most of those gadgets run Android, Google’s mobile OS, so Qualcomm’s good fortunes seem to be tied to the rise of Android in Asia – in TVs and e-readers, as well as more conventional channels.

In addition, Paul Jacobs told the Chinese tech media that it’ll also be pushing its telecoms equipment, such as its Femtocell mobile base-stations, in the region.

[Source: Sohu IT news - article in Chinese]

Gartner has released its estimates of worldwide PC shipments for the fourth quarter of 2011, and Chinese maker Lenovo (HKG:0992) posted the best growth among the top vendors, with 23 percent more shipments in the quarter.

With 14 percent market share, Lenovo still ranks second in global PC shipments just behind market leader HP (NYSE:HPQ), having leapfrogged Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) earlier in the year. HP retains a 16 percent market share despite a 16 percent shipment decline on the previous year. The afore-mentioned Dell sits behind in the third spot with 12.6 percent market share. We don’t hear too many headlines from Dell these days, but the company put up an impressive 30 percent growth in Asia according to the report.

Taiwanese vendors Acer (TPE:2353) and Asus (TPE:2357) rounded out the top five with 10.7 and 6.8 percent market share respectively. Although in terms of growth, the companies went in opposite directions with Asus’s shipments growing by over 20 percent, and Acer’s declining by 18.4.

Globally, PC shipments were down by 1.4 percent, but here in Asia there was an 8.5 percent increase on the same period last year.

Note that this method is better than taking a poll, as asking an invited audience for their opinions can be very self-selecting and reductive. So by taking these stats from popular product searches, we get a free-form and realistic view of what Chinese consumers are keen to buy with their own money. Of course, that doesn’t translate into sales, but it gives a good picture of which smartphones are the most likely to be parting cash from consumers.

So here, in reverse order, is the top ten:

10th. Lenovo A60

Lenovo (HKG:0992) smartphones won’t be too familiar to overseas readers, but they’ve been a low-end to mid-range mainstay in China for years. This A60 is one of the better efforts, with Android 2.3.3 and a 3.5-inch HVGA screen. Lenovo’s custom UI, with those huge round icons, is not exactly classy though. But it seems plenty of Chinese netizens are keen to read-up on the phone with a view to buying it. Afterall, with a China Unicom (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762) subsidy, it’s a cheap ticket to the smartphone club, costing just under 1,000 RMB (US$158).

9th. Meizu MX

Another local kid makes the list, as Shenzhen manufacturer Meizu generates a lot of hype and excitement for its newest MX. The Meizu MX comes with a highly-customized Android 2.3.5 (which it now calls Flyme OS) which looks good on its 4.0-inch screen and is powered by its dual-core processor. The screen is higher-res than many others on the list, at 960 by 640 pixels. Starting at 2999 RMB for the 16GB version, this could be a headache for the more established brands in 2012.

8th. Motorola Defy (ME525+)

Despite Motorola (NYSE:MMI) pushing some high-end business-oriented handsets in China, its cheaper phones are proving to be of interest too. This ME525+ runs Android 2.3.4, has a 3.7-inch screen, and costs about 1,900 to 2,200 RMB.

7th. HTC Wildfire S

And now things get a bit lame, with the ridiculously under-powered Wildfire S from HTC (TPE:2498) – known as the G13 in China – with its small, low-resolution screen that makes it obsolete and unable to run a lot of newer, funkier apps.

Despite running the older Android 2.2 OS, its small form-factor combined with the Sense UI makes this pretty popular around here. It costs about 1,300 on the grey-import market, but it’s a very bad deal via more official channels where it costs 2,000+ RMB.

6th. Samsung Galaxy SII

Samsung’s (005930:KS) new flagship – dubbed the i9100 around here – is the impressive follow-up to the best-selling original Galaxy S. In a recent analytics report, we found that the first version was now the most popular single Android phone model in China, usurping the HTC Desire. But, frustratingly, it seems Samsung might deny all those consumers an upgrade to Android 4.0, which ought to be the decent thing to do for a mere year-old phone. Shame on you, Sammie!

Anyway, Chinese consumers seem to like the TouchWiz UI and other local customization such as a Chinese app store which accepts local payment methods. The Galaxy SII is currently about 3,400 RMB on the grey-import market.

5th. Nokia N9

Halfway through the list, and we finally encounter Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK). This beautiful-looking device seems popular in product searches, though I’m very skeptical that this will translate to sales once people realise it runs a moribund OS – MeeGo – for which there are few games or apps. The 16GB models costs about 3,500 RMB in most gadget malls, although the official local price is a not-so-reasonable 4,888 RMB.

4th. HTC Sensation XE

HTC’s most impressive release this year was perhaps the Sensation XE, which launched in China last month with all the usual Beats ephemera such as branded in-ear headphones and better music software. Its 4.3-inch qHD screen was a welcome feature, as Android phones were so slow to rise to the challenge of Apple’s ‘retina screen’ iPhone. The 1.5GHz dual-core phone, complete with the updated Sense 3.5 UI, costs about 3,500 RMB on unofficial sales channels.

3rd. Apple iPhone 4

Daddy’s home! Yes, Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) ubiquitous iPhone makes the list of popular product searches, but only in third place. With the iPhone 4S still not on sale here officially, it seems the older but aesthetically identical previous model is still in vogue. The 8GB model costs 4,000 RMB when schlepped over the border tax-free from Hong Kong, or 4,500 RMB direct from Apple or China Unicom.

2nd. Nokia N8

Grandpa’s home! Pull up a comfy chair, make a mug of hot chocolate, and get out the medication – because Symbian has just arrived on our list. The creaky old OS is still soldiering on in Nokia’s N8, which is proving popular amongst those who’re familiar with Symbian and its still significant catalog of apps and services.

There have been a lot of bad omens for Nokia in China this year, but the interest in the N8 is a ray of hope at a time when middle-income Chinese have been turning to Android smartphones and the iPhone. The N8 costs about 1,800 RMB.

1st. Xiaomi M1

Regular readers of PO won’t be too surprised to find the much talked about dual-core, Android-powered Xiaomi phone at the top of the list of searches in 2011. It launched with a bang and a breath-taking price tag – just 1,999 RMB – back in August of this year, and ends the year being talked about in the Chinese tech press pretty much everyday, snagging a supply deal with China Unicom, and attracting a further US$90 million in funding – some of which is coming from Yuri Milner’s own pocket.

In October, we dropped into Xiaomi HQ in Beijing to get a hands-on demo of the phone on the same day that it hit shelves across China; here’s the video:

[Hat-tip to QQ Tech news (article in Chinese) for collating the list data; Motorola Defy image from Whatmobile.net, and the Lenovo one from Zol.com.cn]

Coming to a store near you sometime this never.

We’ve written a lot of skeptical things about the eedoo iSec gaming console, and once again, we come with grim tidings. The console’s release, originally slated for this month, has been pushed back yet again, with eedoo’s CEO telling Sina Tech there’s now no scheduled release date.

This second delay isn’t a huge surprise given that halfway through the month we hadn’t seen any signs of the console or even any attempts at marketing or launch hype. What is a surprise is that R&D costs for the iSec console will break $15 million next year, according to the company’s CEO. That’s an awful lot of money, so we assume the thing will come out sooner or later. And I guess maybe that explains why the system will reportedly cost more than any other current-gen console when it does come out.

Sina and other media — including us, in the past — have been reporting that the console is being developed by Lenovo, but actually it’s a bit more complex than that. At present, eedoo is technically its own company, but Lenovo owns controlling share of the company. So…yeah, basically, it’s still part of Lenovo as far as we can tell.

Anyway, we’re hoping to get a chance to actually play this thing someday, so here’s hoping to comes out in this decade. And hey, maybe this delay is a good thing. Perhaps they’re taking extra time to address some of our concerns?

[via Sina Tech]

A leaked WP7-powered Lenovo LePhone S2, from Weibo user @Joker.

Lenovo’s (HKG:0992) own mobile product manager has confirmed that the brand-new LePhone S2 – unveiled yesterday at an event in Beijing – will spawn a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) version in the second half of next year.

That seems to sync with what we’ve heard of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) prepping to partner with retail giant Suning to distribute and promote a whole bunch of WP7 handsets. Indeed, since Lenovo’s S2 is aimed exclusively at China, then this is most sure indication that Microsoft’s WP7 platform is now ready to fight against Android and iOS in China. Indeed, we’ve already seen an apparent test unit running WP7 leak out on Weibo (pictured above).

The Lenovo man, Chen Yue (pictured right), said specifically:

We’ve already decided, the LePhone WP7 version is in testing, and we have a clear timeframe in mind, which is for the second half of 2012.

The refreshed LePhone S2 – see some close-ups over on Chinese Engadget – comes with Android 2.3.4 and a slightly beefier 1.4GHz single-core processor for an unsubsidized 2,990 RMB. It’ll come in TD-SCDMA guise for China Mobile (HKG:0941; NYSE:CHL), along with a WCDMA one for China Unicom (HKG:0762; NYSE:CHU), and a CDMA iteration for China Telecom (HKG:0728; NYSE:CHA). So those are all three telcos covered in China.

Lenovo’s event also revealed that a total of 700,000 of the original LePhone handsets have been sold since its launch in May 2010. Though that sounds good on paper, that was actually a very weak showing from what was touted as being like ‘China’s iPhone’ when it was first launched.

It’s also questionable if it’s wise to make a different OS version of a phone that – by the time of its WP7 brethren coming out – will be nearly a year old. That’s a long time in the fast-moving world of smartphone hardware by which time there will probably be quad-core beasts.

[Source: iMobile - article in Chinese]

Photo: Engadget China

PC maker Lenovo (HKG:0992) will soon be rolling out a new ‘smart TV’ that will be internet-connected and integrated with 200 gigabytes of cloud storage per user, this according to a Wall Street Journal report. It will be called LeTV and it is expected to launch in the first quarter. The choice of names is both an odd one (given that the LeTV name is also used by an online streaming video site) and an obvious choice, because of the company’s previous use of the Le prefix.

The company also says that its new cloud service will facilitate sharing among different devices, although it remains to be seen how well Lenovo can actually execute on this point. But speaking as someone who rarely buys a first-generation model of any product, I’d be very skeptical about LeTV whenever it hits shelves.

We’ve seen other companies explore the smart TV route as well (most notably Samsung) and it’s a refreshing change from companies who focus on 3D as the main selling point in recent television models. Of course there’s no reason you can’t have both, but certainly from my own point of view, internet-enhanced television functions are far more attractive than 3D.

Lenovo didn’t disclose much else about LeTV, but according to my imagination it will feature Pepe Le Pew as its new spokesperson, and he will be aggressively targeting the 18-25 year-old female demographic.

The company also refreshed its phone and tablet lineup yesterday for the Chinese market. You can check out photos and specs over on the Verge.

[Photo: Engadget China, freeextras]

Increasingly, Chinese manufacturers are breaking away from being OEMs and are also casting off the shoddy mantle of making shanzhai – fake, or low-rent – gadgets. That’s because the likes of OPPO, Tian Hua, ZTE, and many more, are aiming to make your next smartphone. In so doing, these ‘designed in China, made in China’ companies are hoping to emulate – and then topple – the likes of HTC (TPE:2498) and Samsung (SEO:005930).

And thanks to both Android and WP7, they have a chance of being the smartphone that more people in the US and Europe slip into their pockets.

Here are six Chinese brands who’re now pushing, and enhancing, their smartphone range more aggressively:

OPPO

(Image source: Engadget)

The Donguan-based OPPO sure likes ambitious marketing, recruiting Hong Kong starlets and even Hollywood heart-throbs for its marketing campaigns. But aside from those clever campaigns, its phones have been lacklustre, and its brand-name is still as low as it can go among Chinese consumers.

But its Android-powered X903 showed potential (pictured above), and it looks like it could find a niche – with later iterations – on American or US telcos as a budget smartphone for those who love hard keyboards.

Tian Hua

Tian Hua has been nicely cashing-in on its W700 smartphone (pictured above) this year, manufacturing it for Alibaba as the first Aliyun phone, for China Unicom (HKG:0762; NYSE:CHU) as a mid-range carrier device, and soon for the Indian telco Micromax.

Now that it has found its stride, it’s a contender for pushing further overseas – although it shows no sign of doing so yet.

Haier

(Image source: Phandroid.com)

Qingdao-based Haier (SHA:600690; HKG:1169) showed some flair earlier this year with the nicely-skinned UI on its seven-inch Haipad Android tablet.

And, indeed, being a larger company than the above two brands, it’s already on US shores – albeit with some low-spec and none-too-alluring phones. But it’s a start.

ZTE

Let’s get more realistic now and talk about a company who’s already making big moves in the US: the Shenzhen-born ZTE (HKG:0763; SHE:000063). Already China’s second-largest telecommunications business, it has hooked-up with UK, US, Canadian, and French telcos already. Its biggest-ever launch happened just this month as its mid-range, large-screen ZTE Warp (pictured above) hit Boost mobile.

ZTE looks the most likely to emulate the success of its Taiwanese brethren at HTC – by building its brand quickly with mid-range Android smartphone that are reasonably stylish and don’t look too off-puttingly cheap.

Huawei

Huawei is finally shaking off the shackles of being the guys behind the $100 (or 1,000 RMB) ultra-budget phones, such as its IDEOS. With such devices costing a reported 700 RMB to manufacture (before even adding in R&D and other overheads), it’s clearly better off building higher-end devices and spreading its name. To that end, the Huawei Honor (pictured above) is its biggest push, hoping to steal sales from LG or Samsung with a 1.4GHz processor behind a decent 4-inch screen. But it’s initially aimed at Russia, China, and the Middle-East; we learned earlier today that it’ll ship in December.

About the name… Huawei remains controversial in the US and elsewhere, unable to lose the stigma of being founded by a Chinese army soldier and retaining close ties to authorities here. That’s hampering Huawei’s telecommunications business – where it competes with Cisco, and Ericsson – and losing it contracts in overseas markets that fear security breaches. Perhaps its smartphones can be a softening touch to win round consumers (and politicians).

Lenovo

Not a smartphone, but a leaked Tegra 3 tablet from Lenovo. (Image source: Engadget)

Lastly, here’s a very well-known name: Lenovo (HKG:0992). Now the world’s number two PC-maker, Lenovo – like Huawei – has been only gradually moving away from cheap smartphones that had to be subsidized by Chinese telcos. It was an odd stage to be in: supposedly making some of the world’s best business-oriented laptops whilst simultaneously making some crappy phones that devalued its brand-name. The stylish LePhone was an interesting gambit, though it largely failed in the face of cheaper devices that weren’t tied to perennially unpopular carrier contracts.

But Lenovo is still lacking in convincing phones, and seems intent on complementing its PC hardware with some powerful Android tablets for the global market instead. There’s a Tegra 3-powered slate reportedly due by the end of the year (pictured above).

iSuppli forecasts that by 2015 global smartphone shipments are expected to grow from 478 million (currently) to 1.03 billion. It’s a higher profit sector than feature phones, and gives scope for international expansion.

Of course, there are still many challenges ahead – such as a lack of world-class local processing power; though Taiwan’s Mediatek (TPE:2454), or China’s Rockchip could grow in-line with strengthening local manufacturers (to truly maximize lower costs).

It’ll be interesting to see how keen – or resistant – western and pan-Asian consumers are to buying Chinese phones.

New numbers from research firm Gartner on the PC market in India say that there’s an increase of nearly 13 percent in the units shipped for the third quarter over the same period a year ago. What’s interesting about this report is that PC growth in India appears to be almost 10 percent higher than the worldwide market growth, which Gartner says is just 3.2 percent for the same period.

It’s also interesting to note that with 15 percent market share Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) edges out HP (NYSE:HPQ) as the dominant PC maker in India, while the company has dropped to third spot behind HP and Lenovo (HKG:0992) globally. [1] But while Dell holds a lead, its share has falled one percent from the previous quarter, while HP’s rose almost two percent. As for Lenovo, it was up 1.7 percent on Q2.

According to Vishal Tripathi, principal researcher at Gartner, the growth comes due to the success of the mobile PC market, up 29 percent in the quarter. He adds:

A number of festivals helped drive demand in the consumer market in India. The third quarter was the best quarter in the history of the Indian PC industry as overall PC shipments crossed 3.15 million units for the first time. The consumer segment accounted for 55 percent of PC shipments.

Looking at the market share breakdown, one might be surprised to see HCL accounting for 5.6 percent. This local technology company is based in Noida, India and according to the report was the only vendor to see a decline in shipments in the third quarter.

[Photo: Dell on Flickr]

This article on Gamasutra in particular is fascinating, as it details the travails of Israel-based iSec developer Side-kick trying to get things to work for Chinese consumers:

The team ran into some surprising control problems when testing with actual Chinese consumers. A handball game, for instance, worked fine in Side-kick’s own internal tests, but just didn’t work with many Chinese test subjects, especially women, he said.

“At first we didn’t figure it out, but then we learned that in China they’re using smaller motions — think tennis vs. ping pong,” Bendov said. “So we actually had to adapt the larger movement window for our market to the smaller, more delicate motions for their market.”

[...]

Difficulty was another area Bendov said needed adjustment for China’s unique social culture. “The first couple of levels, you can not fail,” he said. “It was a big issue that there won’t be any embarrassment, where in the Western markets, that’s kind of a motivation for the user to retry.”

This should be a concern for Chinese gamers, given that Side-kick isn’t the only foreign company developing games for the iSec. Are all of them going to be as cautious about localization as Side-kick appears to have been, or will the system be launching with a bunch of games that just don’t click for Chinese players? There’s no way to know, but it’s certainly another reason to worry.

A bigger problem with developing and tweaking games specifically for the Chinese market, though, is that tends to make them relatively unmarketable elsewhere. Western gamers used to sweeping motions and an immediate challenge, for example, would be likely to write off the game described above as both finicky and way too easy.

That’s fine, of course, but it does create a do-or-die situation for Lenovo in China, as expanding into other regions with the console and it’s China-localized games would mean either (a) entering highly competitive markets with poorly localized games or (b) spending more time and money retweaking and localizing games for the international market.

It seems clear that Lenovo’s chips are all on “China” — makes sense, since it’s a Chinese company — with the iSec, which makes me pretty nervous for them. As I’ve said before, their console costs way too much for the China market especially (at $470 it’s more expensive than an Xbox 360, PS3, or Wii) and there doesn’t appear to be anyone in China interested in it. And that’s leaving aside other problems, like the fact that it appears to be launching only with motion games, most of which look terrible, and it doesn’t have any other special features to justify the exorbitant price tag.

So, uh, who’s excited for that December launch?

via CNBeta

It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a skeptic when it comes to Lenovo’s eedoo iSec gaming console. Even so, I did a double-take last week when I read that the company is planning to charge 3000 RMB ($470) for the console, and release it in December. Really? Let’s count the ways that is crazy:

1. The price is way too high.

Western gamers may recall that people in the US went nuts a few years ago when the Playstation 3 was launched, because they felt at $499, it was too expensive, even for a super-advanced “next gen” system. But that was years ago. Now, Lenovo is launching a console with questionable tech to an even more questionable market at a price point that infuriated consumers in countries with per capita GDPs several times higher than China’s. China may have a growing middle class market, but I’m not convinced anyone is going to want to spend $470 on this thing, especially when you can easily buy Xboxes and PS3s for cheaper.

2. It only does motion gaming.

Yeah, supposedly, it will support games with controllers too, but no one has ever seen one of them, and the console’s official site lists only motion control games. But Chinese consumers already have access to the Nintendo Wii, a motion-control game console with tons of games that only costs $150. If the console remains a de-facto motion-control-only system, then consumers will be faced with a choice in December: should I buy the cheap, proven system with literally thousands of games to choose from? Or should I buy an untested, super-expensive system with 19 games to choose from? I think it’s a pretty obvious choice. Of course, all new consoles launch with a short list of titles, but the iSec’s problem isn’t just quantity…

3. None of the games look good.

Looking through the official videos on eedoo’s Youku site, it’s possible to get a sense for some of the games the console will launch with. I could make crueler choices, but even looking at what appears to be the console’s flagship launch title, DanceWall, it’s hard not to wonder what they were thinking. Admittedly, this demo is old by now so the game may have changed somewhat, but let’s compare it to Xbox Kinect’s flagship dance game, Dance Central. Here’s DanceWall:

And here’s Dance Central:

So, uh, yeah. Even if the eedoo iSec was the same price, which of these games would you buy?

4. No one is interested in it.

Jacking up a console price is one thing when you’ve whipped up a media frenzy. Even with the complaints about the price, people stood in line overnight when the Playstation 3 launched because they were excited about the system. But that excitement doesn’t seem to exist in China, especially not for the eedoo iSec. Look at the play counts on these official iSec preview videos. I’ve said it before, but that was three months ago and the counts have barely gone up since then. Their best video barely cracks 3,000 plays; most are much less. For a game console that’s launching in just a few months (never mind that it was supposed to launch last month), that’s pathetic. And while video plays aren’t the only way to gauge market interest, if Lenovo can’t even get people interested in watching free videos about their console, how the hell are they going to get people interested in shelling out $470 to pay for it?

5. Its non-gaming features don’t dazzle.

Sure, it’s not just a console, it’s a “home entertainment center,” but what does that mean? Well, if the official site is any indication, it means the system will also offer apps. Three of them! And one of them is free. Are you kidding me, guys? I’m beginning to think this system is some kind of elaborate joke. They’re charging $470 for the system and then they’re going to make you pay extra to read the news? Even the most basic smart TV comes with more apps than this, and they’re mostly free. Additionally, the eedoo iSec will apparently offer some kind of streaming video service, but since details are vague, we’ll ignore that for now. But compare that to say, the Xbox 360, which offers impressively-integrated and full-featured apps for (among other services) Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Last.fm and even ESPN.

Granted, most of those are blocked in China so that’s not a relevant point of consideration for consumers here, but it does make you wonder why Lenovo thinks they can charge so much for a console that does so comparatively little. Where’s the Weibo integration? Renren? Youku or Tudou streaming capabilities? Douban streaming radio? As far as we can tell, the console offers none of that. There are mobile phones cheaper than this thing that have more features.

6. We still don’t know much about the tech inside it.

This system was suppose to be released last month, and somehow we still don’t know much more about the hardware or software that’s running it. There are a few details to be found on the motion control tech here, but other specifics are thin on the ground. Perhaps they’re just being careful not to give away secrets, but at some point, people need to know what’s inside the thing if they’re going to be expected to spend so much money on it.

Honestly though, what concerns me the most is not the terrible-looking games, the sky-high price, or the lack of interesting features. It’s quotes like this one from Virgile Delporte, the VP of marketing and business development at SoftKinetic, who have developed the iSec’s motion sensing technology and will also be developing games for the system (from this May 2011 article):

“The Chinese market in itself represents a huge potential [for the iSec] as none of the three current major gaming consoles are available in China.”

Uh, what? Yes, none of the consoles are technically officially available in China (yet), but in reality, there are a half-dozen shops selling them in every electronics mall from Beijing to Shenzhen. Are the guys working on the iSec not aware of this, or do they just think that somehow consumers are going to prefer an official Chinese console, even if it does less and costs way more? Either way, I think they’re misled, and I fully expect a significant price reduction within a few months of what appears to be shaping up to be a very dismal launch.

Lenovo (HKG:0992) has finally put a price, a release date, and a set of snazzy colours on its upcoming eeDoo iSec games console. Slated for a limited, experimental release this December, the console will sell for about 3,000 RMB (US$470) and come in red, white, and black (pictured right).

More important issues, such as how many game titles will be available to consumers and how they’ll hit the High Street, have not been clarified by the Chinese hardware maker.

It has been a long and difficult road to launch for Lenovo’s eeDoo iSec; partly because they’ve never made a gaming console before, and also due to them hitting a huge regulatory barrier: China.

Games consoles are not technically legal in mainland China, and the eeDoo iSec has not yet gained approval from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). Lenovo is calling its new device a “home entertainment system” in order to leap this legal hurdle. It remains to be seen if Lenovo can succeed in this, or perhaps even force a change in the law that’d make Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) XBox and Sony’s (NYSE:SNE) PlayStation legally saleable in China as well. It’s conceivable that the local hardware maker will get the nod, whilst the foreign firms will remain locked out – a recurring issue in the country.

The eeDoo iSec started out with the rather shanzhai name “eBox” back in 2009, before Lenovo rebadged it earlier this year. Chinese tech media report that Lenovo now has a dedicated eeDoo iSec team of 130 employees. There are also reports, which we can’t confirm, that Lenovo has promised game developers 100 percent revenue share – in contrast to the 70 percent cut on Apple’s App Store – if sales of the console fail to ultimately exceed 50 million units.

We’ve followed the iSec pretty closely, from discussing its legality in detail, to cataloging its ongoing delays. And although we now have a price tag, Chinese gamers who’ve been following this saga will be wary of getting too excited just yet.

On a related note, a Microsoft XBox demo booth made an unexpected appearance earlier this week at a Chinese trade fair…

[Source: CNbeta - article in Chinese]

Photo: hktdc.com

Last month we looked at second quarter figures from iSuppli that indicated Lenovo (HKG:0992) had jumped to third spot in the personal computer market. And now today, research firm Gartner estimates that the company’s third quarter shipments are enough to vault it past Dell into the number two spot.

According to Gartner’s preliminary worldwide shipment estimates (which do not include tablets), Hewlett Packard remains the top PC vendor with 17.7 percent market share (up from 17.3 last year). This despite recent news that it might be looking to spin off its PC business, although today The Wall Street Journal says HP is rethinking that plan.

Lenovo’s strong showing was helped by its tie-up with Japan’s NEC. The Chinese PC maker took 13.5 percent of the market, up from 11.1 percent last year. This was enough to overtake Dell, which sits in third spot with 11.6 percent. Taiwanese vendors Acer and Asus round out the global top five at 10.6 percent and 6.2 percent respectively.

Looking at the big picture in Asia, Gartner says that PC shipments grew six percent over last year, reaching 31.8 million units shipped in the third quarter of 2011. In Japan, shipments were up three percent, with 3.9 million units moved.

Lenovo had a big launch yesterday at the Mumbai Flying Club to announce the release of three tablets in the country. The Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet 64GB will sell for Rs 46,900 ($954) and is aimed at business users, with both 3G and Wi-fi versions. The other two are consumer-oriented, and less pricey: the K1 is priced at Rs. 29,990 ($610), and the A1 costs Rs 14,990 ($305).

The Lenovo Thinkpad tablet – which runs Android 3.1 – is the business beast, and uses a 10-inch (1280×800 resolution) IPS panel with scratch-proof Corning Gorilla Glass. IPS panels are well-known for good color reproduction and wide viewing angles – indeed Lenovo claims 178 degrees of viewability! But the glass surface is reflective, and visibility does tend to decrease in a bright room or during outdoor use. Like many tablets, it does tend to be a fingerprint magnet. When I asked Lenovo India staffers at the launch about this, they said the R&D department is “working on it.”

For business…

Lenovo shows off new tablets at Mumbai Flying Club

Other business-class features for this Nvidia Tegra 2-powered tablet include the Good Technologies “easy and secure” email access, Cisco VPN support for securely accessing company networks, Microsoft ActiveSync, and the ability to encrypt user’s data on both the internal storage and the SD cards. Both come with 16GB of SSD storage. Lenovo promises up to 8.7 hours of battery life for the WiFi version.

For pleasure…

The K1 has the same size screen and other key specs – and also runs Android 3.1 – but is aimed at regular folk who want a fun tablet. There’s the option of 16- or 32GB of SSD storage. You can see a quick promo video for the K1 at the bottom of this post.

The smaller Lenovo’s A1 has a 7-inch (1024×600 resolution) display with battery life of up to 5 hours, and weighs less than 420 grams. It runs only Android 2.3 – which was designed for smartphones, not tablets – and, according to Lenovo, is powered by Texas Instrument’s 1 GHz OMAP 3622 processor. Although cheaper and less powerful than the other two slates, this one still has 3G and Wi-fi connectivity support. There’s also a 0.3 megapixel camera on the front and a 3.0 megapixel one to the rear.

All three tablets comes with a set of pre-loaded Android software and Lenovo apps. For example, there’s GPS with offline maps, and Lenovo’s SocialTouch software that gives the end user quick access to their favorite social networking sites within a single application.

Focus on India

Lenovo also paid their respects to Steve Jobs, and called him a great innovator in the industry.

Lenovo India made it clear that they’re keen on establishing a strong market presence in India, including service support in many cities, and the company has started ad campaigns in newspapers, on TV, and online.

The company also said that they don’t intend to label it as a PC killer, let alone the cliché of an “iPad killer.” Rajiv Rao, director of Lenovo India’s SMB department, said during the launch that there is a distinct place for tablets, notebooks, and netbooks. Lenovo representatives did say they’re in fourth position in the PC market overall in India but they’re aiming for first.

A close-up of the lid of the Lenovo IdeaPad Z370 laptop.

Chinese hardware maker Lenovo (HKG:0992) has moved up into third place in terms of global market share of PC shipments, with world-beating annual growth to match. The new stats from iSuppli (see the table below) this week show preliminary Q2 2011 data, and highlight Lenovo’s move up one rank from the previous quarter.

This is Lenovo’s highest ever-ranking, taking it up to the late-IBM heydays of over half a decade ago. Its year-on-year growth of 23 percent beat even Apple’s rate of acceleration (13.6 percent). The Chinese firm shipped 25.6 percent more PCs than the previous quarter. iSuppli’s Matthew Wilkins said:

Beyond the continuing strength in its home market of China – where both the economy and PC demand continued to expand vigorously — Lenovo’s performance in the second quarter was boosted by rising sales in other regions. These regions included the broader Asia-Pacific area, as well as the United States, with Lenovo performing well in those places because of demand from the enterprise segment.

Here are the new figures, which we took the liberty of putting into a prettier table:

Not shown on the table is another Chinese PC vendor, Haier (HKG:1169), which reportedly saw a recent, rapid rate of growth. Samsung (SEO:005930) secured the strongest surge in shipments this quarter, up 31.3 percent.

The WSJ reported last week that Lenovo had hired Acer’s (TPE:2353) former CEO, Gianfranco Lanci, as an advisor, in a bid to strengthen its consumer hardware (and hopefully style and design, too).

Asus Up, Acer Down; PCs Not Dead

Speaking of Acer… There were wildly contrasting fortunes for the two Taiwanese contenders. Acer was down 4 percent this quarter; sliding 20 percent over the previous year. Asus (TPE:2357), meanwhile, entered the global top five for the first time.

In other news, the PC industry is not dead, despite a very shaky start to the year. Of course, all the global top eight have tablet products – oh, wait… except for HP – as a back-up in case the bottom falls out of the already margins-squeezed consumer computer market. Lenovo’s own is the IdeaPad, which doesn’t look to be the killer Android slate that some people have been waiting for.

HP (NYSE:HPQ) managed to eek out a small amount of growth – an amusing extra three PCs this quarter! It’s still not clear if the American giant plans to sell off its PC division – which is why last month we looked at five Chinese hardware makers that might want to buy it up.

[Source: IHS iSuppli]

What are your 3 favorite types of Android applications?

What type of application have you paid the most for?

The survey also asked users how much they were willing to pay for a great Android application. Here the results were not quite so clear, with 235 respondents answering less that $2, but 99 respondents saying they would pay more than $3.

How much are you willing to pay for a great application?

For those of you who may not be aware, Lenovo is making a pretty big push in the tablet space, aiming to ship between 1.5 and 2 million tablet PCs this year. The company just became the third-largest PC brand during the second quarter, surpassing Taiwan’s Acer which slipped a spot. On a related note, former Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci has just been hired as a consultant by none other than Lenovo for its worldwide consumer business.

But can the company’s success translate to its tablet business as well? The country general manager of Lenovo Singapore noted that working to develop good applications is an important part of this process:

IdeaPad Tablet K1

The application ecosystem is key to mobile product growth and usage. Application development is on the rise and this has led to the rapid growth of application stores. There is tremendous potential right now to produce high quality and affordable applications to make devices even more indispensable to customers. With this survey, we hope to generate awareness of consumer and business application preferences.”

Hey Xbox users, this look familiar?

The iSec — its official Chinese name is the aisaike — is Lenovo’s entry in the Chinese gaming console market, a market which technically does not exist since the sale of game consoles is illegal in China. For this reason, the iSec is technically classified as a “home entertainment device,” but in actuality the system is a gaming console with games based on a motion sensor copied from similar to Microsoft’s Kinect. If its official site is any indication, the similarities don’t end there. The lime-green and gray/white swooping designs will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever seen the packaging of an Xbox 360.

Previously, I’ve expressed some healthy skepticism about the console’s — excuse me, the “home entertainment” device’s — potential, and I remain unconvinced. For example, what I said then about their video views remains true — this console was supposed to come out within the month and they can’t even get more than 2,000 views on their promotional videos? That’s not good. There doesn’t seem to be any real hype surrounding this release, and given that Lenovo is trying to create a market more or less out of thin air — there is a thriving gray market for consoles, but that’s another issue — they’re going to need all the hype they can get.

That said, the fact that they plan to release playable display models a month or two before the official release of the console is a sign that the company is confident in its product, at least. If it’s not a solid system, of course, such a move would be disastrous, but if it is fun to play, a month or two of word-of-mouth buzz could be exactly what they need to build hype (and pre-orders).

A list of games for the system — all motion-controlled games so far — is available here. We’ll keep an eye on the iSec and see if we can’t go a few rounds with some of these games once the demo machines are released into the wild.

[Sina Tech via Marbridge Consulting, image via eeDoo's official site]

It was recently rolled out in emerging markets with a focus placed on Indonesia, Mexico, and Russia (note the brief appearance of Russia’s ‘Chess Terminator‘). Before we go about discussing about the campaign, check out this 60-second TV commercial to get an idea of what it’s all about.

So what’s the rationale behind this campaign? Surely the bottom line is to sell more laptops and tablets, right? But there’s more to it.

There is a spirit or brand personality that Lenovo is trying to communicate through this campaign. Instead of being seen as yet-another-PC-maker, Lenovo wants you to know that it’s a DO company. What does that mean? I was a little confused too but this is what Howie Lau, Lenovo’s VP of Marketing for EMG has to say:

[The campaign] revolves around the concept that we are a Do company that is focused on action. This idea is the essence of what personal technology should be: Tools that ignite human accomplishment. Not just potential, but real action and tangible achievement. . . We feel that “For Those Who Do” is an authentic position for Lenovo because it specifically defines who we are as a company. Lenovo at its core is a company focused on action. As Lenovo employees, we do what we say, and we own what we do.

When thinking of PCs, some other famous taglines that come to mind are HP’s – “The computer is personal again”, and Apple’s “Think Different.” Will Lenovo’s catch on? Who knows.

I haven’t owned a Lenovo product long enough to make a judgement here. Admittedly, the commercial looks good but the product has to support the statement. Lau did share with me that internally, Lenovo’s employees are exercising this “Do” culture:

We are a global company powered by innovators and inventors who are obsessed with making perfect tools for the community of Those Who Do. Lenovo employees are driven by this motto – Do what you say, and own what you do.

Any consumer that hears such commitment from a brand will be happy. It’s a huge promise — something that requires time to prove. We’ll have to wait and see if Lenovo can live up to its motto.

There have been some shock announcements coming out of HP headquarters after its Q2 2011 earnings call. Aside from the supposed abandonment of its newly-acquired mobile and tablet software platform, WebOS, it seems that HP might also exit the not-exactly-thriving consumer PC business. And that’d be great news for some Chinese and Taiwanese PC makers.

With word that HP is likely looking to spin-off and sell-off its PC division, it’s inevitable we think of who might profit from HP’s apparent shift in strategy, away from the reported seven percent profit margins of the PC industry to the healthier cuts to be made from enterprise solutions.

Chinese and Taiwanese companies will be key among them, eyeing a buy-out of the world’s biggest PC maker, which last quarter shipped 9.7 million computers to take a 15 percent global share.

We’ve been here before, of course. In late 2004 the Chinese firm Lenovo, then little-known in the wider world, bought IBM’s PC group for US$1.75 billion. At the time, IBM was the world’s third-largest PC vendor, with a 5.3 percent market share. Since then it has slipped down to be the fifth-biggest, but with a 7.5 percent cut. So it has become more dominant despite selling fewer units. It’s a telling tale of how new hardware makers have cropped up, selling budget machines such as netbooks, undercutting some more ‘premium’ brands such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo. That’s why Acer has vaulted over Lenovo in the past two years.

The buy-out, nonetheless, helped Lenovo to rebrand – it anglicised its moniker from ‘Lian Xiang,’ which remains as its Chinese name – and gave it an immediate space on global retailer’s shelves. Lenovo still makes IBM’s signature ThinkPad brand, and did not perceptibly disturb consumers in the way the American brand suddenly turned Chinese.

So, with IBM-Lenovo as a working model, who might be up for grabbing HP’s PC division? Here are five feisty candidates:

Foxconn

If Foxconn fancied taking its integration vertical, then HP would be a great buy. The Taiwanese OEM manufactures parts for numerous major brands, such as Apple, Dell, Nintendo, and HP itself.

Foxconn has in recent years even been experimenting with retailing, as a literal store-front for the many brands it manufactures for. All that’s missing is a brand of its own.

Lenovo

Are we really in the post-PC era, where desktop and laptop computers are encumbrances, not desirable gadgets? Could some households forego a PC completely, and instead enjoy his’n’hers tablets? If that’s not the case – as Mashable recently affirmed – then Lenovo might like to make itself into the world’s largest PC producer by acquiring HP’s segment. Looking at the most recent Q2 figures, it’s clear to see that Lenovo’s 4.8 million units plus HP’s 9.7m equates to 14.5m computers as a HP-Lenovo mega corp – outselling Dell (7.5m) and even all of Apple’s Macs and iPads to be the planet’s biggest.

True, Lenovo doesn’t really need HP’s brand or know-how, unlike the four other Chinese/Taiwanese contenders, but being the biggest computer hardware maker in the world is suddenly quite easily within its grasp.

Great Wall

One of the many PCs and laptops from the Great Wall computer company.

Who? Well, exactly. China Great Wall Computer Shenzhen (SHE:000066) – catchy, huh? – is the biggest computer maker in the world that you’ve never heard of. In fact, most Chinese might’ve even forgotten that this old name still exists, after likely getting their first taste of computing on one of its machines in the early 1990s.

When we looked at China’s updated Fortune 500 list for 2011, Great Wall Computers was up there in 33rd place, with 83.4 billion RMB in annual revenue. Lenovo was in 22nd place.

Part of the Great Wall industrial empire, the Great Wall computing division has made baby steps towards going international in recent years, such as fully buying up its Hong Kong subsidiary, which is its export-point to the world. But, for now, Great Wall’s machines are popular mainly just in rural areas. Also, the company, in its words and its ethos, sounds more like a Communist bureaucracy, with its “Five Year Plans” and “glorious” products, which makes it look not very ready to go global.

Haier

Haier is a company that has ambitions to be China’s Samsung, but it’s missing a properly viable PC business. It does manufacture PCs, but they have about as much credibility among China’s consumers as those from Great Wall.

Haier does better at home appliances, such as air-con units and fridges. But its gadgets are somewhat improving, with a nice-looking new reiteration of the HaiPad Android-powered tablet launching this summer NBA fans will recognise the name from its big-spending basketball sponsorships.

Acer

Yes, Taiwan’s Acer Inc is now the world’s fourth biggest selling PC maker, one step ahead of Lenovo. But it’s in a precarious position at the lowest end of the food chain, selling mostly laptops and budget devices, where the margins are thinnest. Acer has already done some shopping, snapping up Gateway in 2007 in order to get back into the US market.

Buying-out HP’s PC business would take Acer more upmarket, and get them into more offices. It’d also give them a chance to battle Dell. The company knows that it takes a big investment to operate in the US and Europe, so I get the feeling that the word “HP” is bouncing off the walls of Acer’s Taipei and Californian HQs.

Of course, there are some non-Chinese contenders, such as the Korean brands Samsung or LG, which both have PC-making divisions that lack global traction. Hit the comments to tell us what you think of HP’s move, and any likely suitors.

The software was met with criticism from all sides. It censored indiscriminately, blocking anything that contained images with human-like skin tones in large quantities (which it interpreted as nudity). It censored political content. An American company accused its designers of stealing their code. But mostly, the problem was that it wasn’t very well written and had serious security holes. In the face of criticism from the public and experts alike, the project was postponed and eventually scrapped.

Since then, the software has, to paraphrase Mike Tyson, faded into Bolivian. Most Chinese people have probably forgotten about it, but guess who hasn’t? Cybersitter, the US company who claims the Chinese developers of Green Dam stole 3,000 lines of their code.

The Lawsuit

The case has become something of a legal turf war. Cybersitter, an American company, filed its claim in the California court system. The suit names Zhengzhou Jinhui Computer System Engineering and the Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy — the developers of Green Dam — as defendants, but it also names a number of Chinese and international companies who were complicit in installing the software on their machines, including Haier, Sony, Acer, and Lenovo. Since the Chinese government had initially paid Jinhui and Dazheng — the developers — for a software license, the PRC government itself was also implicated in the suit.

Various defendants have tried to get the suit dismissed. First the multinationals filed to have the suit dropped, but the court rejected them back in December 2010. Haier moved to have the entire suit dismissed on the grounds that US courts cannot try a foreign government, but their motion was also dismissed on the grounds that a US court can try a foreign state if it’s engaged in commercial activity that has a direct effect in the US.

Most recently, another dismissal motion — this one from the developers of Green Dam themselves — was rejected on Monday. Jinhui and Dazheng had sought to have themselves dismissed as defendants on the grounds that they’re Chinese companies that were acting solely within China. However, the California court said that they had allegedly committed criminal acts while being fully aware that Cybersitter was based in California and that its business there could be damaged.

The case, it seems, will go to trial whether the Chinese defendants want it to or not. Were the court to find Dazheng and Jinhui at fault, it’s unclear how any ruling and penalties could be enforced, but the defendants had better hope they can’t be, because Cybersitter is seeking a cool $2.2 billion in damages.

If you’re curious, feel free to peruse Cybersitter’s filing below:

Cybersitter complaint for misappropriation of trade secrets, etc

[Via PC World. Image Source]

It’s an interesting marketing effort on the part of Lenovo, as the company’s senior marketing communication manager, Song Qi explained:

Product placement in Transformers: Dark of the Moon is part of our global branding strategy and a big step towards our further international expansion. This film really resonates with Chinese audiences as many people that grew up watching the Transformers cartoons also represent the ideal ThinkPad customer.

Didi Zhang, the entertainment and marketing director of Ogilvy & Mather Beijing, noted the importance of integrating the product into the story:

From the start, we didn’t want the ThinkPad Edge Plus to be obtrusive or distracting; our goal was to make it relevant to the movie so that it would be memorable to viewers.

Indeed China has a pretty intense love-affair with the Transformers franchise, and evidence of this is springing up in cities around the country — namely in Wuhan and in Changchun.

As much as I like the idea of a laptop Transformer, I can’t help but wish that Soundwave, the deep-voiced cassette deck Decepticon, had made it back into the film in his original form. But I guess these things have to be modernized, and bringing in a laptop character does make sense. Check out Lenovo’s promo video featuring Brains below.

Transformers 3 opens in Chinese theaters today. If you do check out the film, keep your eyes peeled for Brains.

Other headline stats are that China’s top 500 raked in revenues totaling 18.9 trillion RMB, which accounts for 47 percent of China’s GDP. Profits were up too – to 1.9 trillion RMB, a rise of 47 percent over last year’s.

China Mobile was the only web or tech company in the top ten. With 485.2 billion RMB (that’s US$75 bil.) in revenue, the country’s biggest mobile telco held onto its third-place position from the previous year. China Telecom placed 14th; China Unicom 19th.

The biggest tech hardware maker on the list was, unsurprisingly, Lenovo. At 22nd place on 2011′s list, it slipped two places from last year’s, with a quoted 1.67 billion RMB in profits.

Not far behind Lenovo in the top 500 are two fast-rising surprises: Great Wall Technology (0074.HK) at 28th place, up from 68th last year. Plus, its computer-making subsidiary China Great Wall Computer Shenzhen (SHE:000066) ranked 33rd, up from 118th.

Still speaking of hardware, Haier – which launched its new HaiPad tablet last week – rose a good number of places to be 59th this time around.

On the web and social media front, Tencent leads the way again – up slightly to 173rd place, with revenues of 19.65 billion. China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, rose to be 337th on the Fortune list, on revenues of 7.9 billion.

You can peruse the full 500 list on Fortune China’s site, in Chinese, at the source link below. Or you could check out our own PDF of the entire list, with the disclaimer that the machine-translated names might be inaccurate in places, in this embed:

[Source: Fortune China - article in Chinese]

So is the iSec, as a game console, even legal to sell in China? Lenovo says yes, because — they’re seriously arguing this — it isn’t a game console, it’s a home entertainment device. According to this article, their argument seems to be that gaming is just one of the console’s functions. It also can play movies and music. Of course, so can the banned Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles, and even the PS2 and Xbox original — remember, the one with the giant controllers? — could play CDs and DVDs. But Lenovo is a Chinese company, and there’s some indication that they may be allowed to take their product to market in China even though it’s very clearly a console.

This raises some very interesting questions about protectionism, and I suggest you read this very thorough article by Stan Abrams over at China Hearsay about it. But I want to ask a different question entirely.

There are a few possible scenarios here:

1. MIIT approves the iSec as an “entertainment device”, but other consoles remain illegal.
2. MIIT approves the iSec, and other consoles also enter the legal Chinese market as “entertainment devices”.
3. MIIT gets cold feet and halts the launch of the iSec.

I don’t think that any of these outcomes are particularly great for the iSec.

If outcome #1 occurs, and the iSec is the only legal device on the market, why on earth would anyone in China buy it? I expect Lenovo will have a hard time offering titles that are on par with the AAA titles on offer from American and Japanese developers, and remember, Chinese games get Xbox 360 titles (for example) basically for free on pirated discs. Why pay $40 for one decent iSec game when you can get five great XBox 360 games for $2? Why even buy an iSec?

(Pricing for iSec games isn’t clear yet, and the console will come bundled with at least one game, but there’s simply no way that developers could afford to offer games at the prices for which pirated games are offered, so regardless of whether the pricing is really $40/game or not, you can be sure iSec games are going to cost more than pirated Xbox discs).

And who would buy the iSec outside China’s borders, where Lenovo doesn’t seem to even be marketing it? Perhaps they’ve got something up their sleeve here, but right now it looks like their only real selling points are that their console is Chinese and that it is legal in China. These are not factors that American, European, or Japanese gamers are likely to care about.

If outcome #2 occurs, then the iSec faces extremely stiff competition from rivals who can immediately bring a huge library of games and international development teams to bear on the market. Since most Chinese gamers prefer PC anyway, it doesn’t seem likely the iSec could carve out a big enough slice of what market there is to make this entire endeavor worth it. Of course, being a Chinese system, the iSec would probably have the advantage of having more local games — Three Kingdoms RPGs and whatnot — but there are so many of these available on the PC already that I can’t see many people buying a console specially for that purpose.

Moreover, even with consoles legalized, there’s no real reason to believe pirated discs and systems wouldn’t continue to be widely available. The iSec itself may well be susceptible to piracy if China’s lax enforcement strategy isn’t changed dramatically, and unlike Microsoft or Sony, their console can’t be floated by strong sales numbers abroad.

Of course, the iSec’s ability to compete at all depends largely on whether or not the tech actually works. Microsoft’s Kinect is a bit fiddly, and if at times the experience is sublime, most games for the system fall flat on their face. I haven’t gotten a chance to try the iSec firsthand, but some of their promotional videos make it look like there’s a noticeable delay between the player’s movements and the onscreen avatar’s reactions. This, for example, is pretty unconvincing:

“DanceWall”, the game that will come bundled with the system as one of iSec’s flagship titles, appears to be a long, long, long way behind games like Dance Central on the Kinect.

If outcome #3 occurs, of course, then Lenovo has just wasted an awful lot of time and money on an illegal product.

So will anyone actually play the iSec? I have to wonder. In the process of researching this post, I noticed that eedoo, the Lenovo subsidiary developing the system, has an official account on Youku [Full disclosure: I work for Youku] with gameplay demos and other relevant videos. Youku is China’s largest video site, but eedoo’s videos have remarkably low playcounts. In fact, searching though all the iSec videos, not a single one of them had over 3,000 plays, and most of them barely had a few hundred. Compare that to, for example, this video for the Xbox, Playstation, and PC game Modern Warfare 3 which was posted to Youku around the same time as Eedoo’s iSec videos and has accrued more than 500,000 plays and over 1,000 comments. I can’t find anything approaching that kind of interest for any iSec games, even though the console and the first games are set to launch later this year (as is Modern Warfare 3).

Protectionism or no, I think Lenovo may need to ask themselves some hard questions about whether or not anyone’s actually going to buy or play the iSec. Getting a game console to be legal on the Chinese market could be quite a coup, but it will be an empty one if the thing is just sitting on store shelves while Chinese games continue to play their gray-market Xbox games.

(Image source: China Hearsay)

The order is believed to be for six different handsets, of 500,000 to 600,000 units each. All of them will be 3G smartphones, on the homegrown TD-SCDMA frequency that China Mobile uses, and they will all be low- to mid-level phones on the cheaper end of the smartphone scale.

Mobile TV is the most unique feature that the phones will bring. Again, this is a China-developed technology – the CMMB standard for mobile TV transmission – that is being pushed by the state-owned China Mobile.

The mobile TV roll-out started in March of this year, across 300 cities and to huge fanfare in (state) media – see this Sina Tech report from the time (article in Chinese).

It’s not clear which OS this new batch of mobiles will be running, but it is very likely that they’re also rocking China Mobile’s own Android modification, dubbed OPhone, which has mobile TV support baked in – as seen in the two photos of the OPhone-powered Lenovo O1 in this post.

China Mobile has struggled to get appealing handsets onto its TD-SCDMA network, but this year finally got some attractive top-end Motorola and HTC smartphones.

Between the previous sales figures and this new crop of mobile TV smartphones, China Mobile actually looks set to reach its initial goal of selling five million of them by the end of this year. Perhaps by then I will also have seen someone actually watching live TV on their phone, which I’ve not yet spotted.

[News source: Marbridge Consulting; Photo source: Zol.com.cn]

Metersbonwe in the second Transformers film

The Metersbonwe clothing brand appeared in the last film, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but is back for an encore appearance in Dark of the Moon. TCL televisions are also featured in the movie, as well as Lenovo computers with reportedly five close-up shots of its logo in the film. The PC maker has also incorporated Transformers 3 into commercials promoting its Thinkpad Edge (see below).

The most surprising Chinese brand to get the Michael Bay endorsement is Yili milk, which you may remember from its role in Total (Milk) Recall back in 2008. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I suspect that the Autobots might slip some into the Megatron’s coffee, thus poisoning him and saving the world.

But seriously, I’m sure that stuff is totally safe now… Yeah.

While four Chinese brands in one film may seem like a lot, that’s only the tip of the iceberg as there are 68 brands in total represented in the movie. Not surprisingly car companies will be the stars, most notably the yellow Chevy Camaro in the role of Bumblebee. Ferrari and Mercedes Benz also have roles in the film.

Photos: shizhuang365

A Chinese recruitment website has released a survey of over 200,000 university students, asking them to choose the companies where they would like to work. Technology companies are well represented, so we thought we’d take a look at the top employers in each of the following sectors: online entertainment, Internet/e-commerce, computer hardware/software, and telecommunications.

Chinese Gaming Giants Beat out SNS

In online entertainment we have gaming companies Shanda and Giant topping the list (see table below), with video site Youku taking the third spot. Social networks Renren and Kaixin are in here as well, as is Facebook, perhaps the most surprisingly company listed considering that it doesn’t yet have a China presence.

Alibaba most attractive Internet company

In the Internet and e-commerce space, Alibaba stole the top spot from search giants Baidu and Google. Alibaba was, in fact, the third-placed company out of all employers in China, not just those in the technology sector.

It’s interesting to note that students still see Google as a desirable place to work despite the many troubles that the company has had in China over the past few years.

Would you like to work for Mac or PC?

In the personal computer space, Chinese manufacturer Lenovo topped the list while Apple finished in second. It’s somewhat surprising to see Foxconn make third place on this ‘desirable employer’ list, given all the reports of poor working conditions here. But of course, the job conditions for university grads are going to be far better than what we see in the news about Foxconn factories.

Meanwhile on the software side, Microsoft and IBM top the list.

And the winner is…

In the communications industry, China Mobile was the top ranked employer. In fact, the telecommunications giant was the number one company on this list for the third consecutive year. Huawei is a surprise at number two, or rather, it’s a surprise to me at least. While Huawei is a most remarkable Chinese company making waves on a global scale, it used to have a reputation for being a terrible place to work.

Communications / telecommunications industry
1. China Mobile Communications Corporation
2. Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
3. China Telecom
4. China Unicom Group Ltd.
5. ZTE Corporation
6. Nokia (China) Investment Co., Ltd.
7. Motorola Mobile Technology (China) Co., Ltd.
8. Ericsson (China) Communications Co., Ltd.
9. Cisco Systems (China) Technology Co., Ltd.
10. Datang Telecom Technology Industry Group

Note: These lists were machine translated with some manual correction where I saw appropriate. If there’s an inaccuracy, please let us know.

The BlackBerry PlayBook is due to launch in 16 additional markets over the next 30 days, including five countries in the Asia Pacific region, namely Indonesia, India, Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore. The announcement was made last Friday night. The full list of countries below:

• UK
• Netherlands
• Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
• Hong Kong
• Australia
• Venezuela
• Spain
• Germany
• UAE
• Singapore
• Mexico
• France
• Italy
• India
• Indonesia
• Colombia

RIM’s BlackBerry is a popular mobile brand in all the five Asia Pacific countries mentioned but it remains to be seen if the PlayBook can enjoy similar success. In Indonesia RIM’s tablet is already available in the black market, priced at around $975, a huge contrast compared to the highest price of an authorized model at $699.

Prior to the launch announcement, RIM had also teased BlackBerry fans in the Philippines and Indonesia with its “Meet The PlayBook” campaign, capturing the attention of bloggers’ interest in both countries. That said, it is somewhat surprising that Philippines wasn’t included in the list of countries in RIM’s release.

Gregory Wade, RIM’s managing director for Southeast Asia said that RIM’s research has shown that Indonesia is a market that is becoming tablet savvy and is very interested in consuming multimedia tablets.

Indonesia is a market crowded with tablets offerings, and in recent months we have seen Lenovo’s LePad, Acer’s Iconia Touchbook, Huawei’s Ideos S7, and the mighty iPad 2 all made available in Indonesia. With the addition of BlackBerry PlayBook, Indonesians are seriously spoilt for choice.

We have included three introductory videos, including two application demos on the PlayBook (they look pretty awesome). Catch them below and let us know if you would buy a BlackBerry PlayBook.

BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet — It’s here!

BlackBerry PlayBook ‘Scrapbook’ App Demo

BlackBerry PlayBook Need For Speed Demo

Call it cheesy or lame, but Lenovo YouTube marketing campaign scores big in Taiwan. Leveraging on a popular drama serial in the country, Lenovo blatantly employed a product placement tactic in two YouTube videos. In the video, the characters use the Lenovo Thinkpad as protection cover during an earthquake. The point, obviously, is to show how tough the Lenovo Thinkpad is. If that wasn’t enough to show the Thinkpad’s toughness, one scene also shows that the product remains functional even after water is splashed on the keyboard.

The popularity of the videos wasn’t boosted by YouTube though. It only has about 60,000 views on the video site. Nonetheless, the Lenovo Thinkpad videos managed to get coverage on TVBS (Taiwan’s news channel), for five long minutes.

Besides walking through how “awesome” the videos are, the reporter also went the extra mile to promote the product. Lenovo Thinkpad was also shown being used as a chopping board and paper cutter back. The Lenovo Thinkpad survived it all.

It’s a good results for the Lenovo Thinkpad team. But I do have doubt whether the TV news report is purchased rather than picked naturally by the media. 30,000 views isn’t too viral to capture the media’s attention. The stunts done on the playbook are certainly media worthy, though.

Realizing the value of that market, Lenovo has set a target that 25% of its overseas sales will be from Indonesia. The Chinese maker has already launched four low priced mobile phones, and will continue its push launching five devices this month, all priced below 1 million IDR (US$ 115). Among these will be an Android-based touch smartphone called LePhone. Lenovo’s hybrid tablet, LePad, is a 10-inch tablet that can run either both Android OS or Windows.

Acer, well known for its notebook and netbook products here in Indonesia, has also turned its focus to tablets. The company launched the Iconia Touchbook last week, which features as i5 processor, two 14-inches screens made of Gorilla Glass, multi-touch, and movement reflect. Acer Iconia sports a new ‘ring’ interface on top of a Windows 7 OS. A user can choose between the items on the ring with a swipe of the finger. Iconia Touchbook can be purchased for around US$1,200.

While Dell is making a strong push in China, they are also rumored to launch the Dell Streak in Indonesia around April or May. Running Android 2.2, and featuring an NVIDIA 2 mobile processor, it will be tagged with at around $500 to $700 (US) price point. With a 7-inch WVGA screen, Dell Streak can access email, IM, and video conferencing. There will be a 3G version too, so users can text and send MMS on the go. The device is equipped with a 5 megapixel front-facing camera and 1.3 megapixel camera around back.

Huawei, another Chinese IT brand, will challenge for the tablet crown along with the Huawei Ideos S7. Running on Android 2.1, with a 7-inches WVGA screen, it has HD video and Hi-speed web browsing. Priced at US$350, Huawei is targeting a lower market. By working together with XL Axiata (one of the biggest local telcos), Huawei hopes to make the task of marketing this tablet a little easier.

For me, Apple with iPad and iPad 2 will still hold the upper hand because of its branding and wide selection of apps. While Apple is the clear favorite in the race, it still remains to be seen who will take the lower section of the market among the Android tablets.

Image Credit

Lenovo, a well-known PC vendor from China has entered the Indonesia mobile phone market through a new mobile unit in the country. At the end of last month, the company launched four low-priced mobile phones for the Indonesia market – the Lenovo E156, A125, Q320 and Q350. Lenovo is also the third largest mobile brand in China, only behind Nokia and Samsung.

After Taiwan and Vietnam, Indonesia is Lenovo’s third foreign country for market expansion. Ling Qi, General Manger of Overseas Department at Lenovo Group, said that Indonesia’s large population was the key reason that triggered the move. With Indonesia’s mobile market on the rise, there is truly a huge growth potential for Lenovo. By launching only low price mobile phones, it seems that Lenovo will start from low and medium market. However, they plan to bring more models, including the LePhone and LeTablet, later this year. Lenova aims to get 25 percent of its overseas sales revenue from Indonesia by the end of March 2012.

Besides the Indonesia market, Lenovo is also fighting a PC battle with Dell and HP back in China. Dell had previously indicated its determination to be the PC leader by pledging $250 billion in China over the next 10 years.

via Market+

Currently, the United States is the largest PC market in terms of shipment figures. China is ranked second but is poised to overtake United States within the next decade. Shipments are expected to rise 14 percent to 74 million units next year, outperforming the other markets with single digit growth rate.

“This is going to be battle royale,” Amit Midha, head of Dell’s China operations, told the Reuters China Investment Summit. “This is not for the faint-hearted, and it’s only the first inning of a very long game.”

Every business wants a piece of China

Even after the China-Google saga (which left Google in an awkward position in China) Google still considers China as the heart of the Internet. Google may not be able to challenge in search but advertising and maps are some areas where Google still has a role to play.

Groupon also has one eye on China. The social group buying website has acquired several copycat sites in Asia and is looking to do the same in China. On the other hand, companies like Facebook and Twitter, which are banned in China, are facing uphill battle to enter this lucrative market. The result is the rise of Facebook and Twitter clones in China, which has further heightened the barrier of entry.