US computer maker Dell Inc unveiled a low-cost computer Wednesday which it said was specifically designed for the Chinese market and could help large numbers of novices get online.
The Dell EC280, priced at between 2,599 and 3,999 yuan (335 and 515 dollars), was developed by engineers at Dell's China Design Center located in Shanghai, the company told a briefing in the east Chinese city.
"Today there are one billion people online world-wide and many of the world's second billion users are right here in China," chief executive Michael Dell said in statement. "We intend to earn their confidence and their business."
Dell announced earlier this month a 33-percent dive in fourth-quarter profits but it is ranked number three in computer shipments in China and saw a 26-percent increase in revenues in Asia's second-largest economy last year.
China's Internet is a rapidly expanding business, with 137 million Chinese estimated to be online as of the end of last year, state media said previously.
Dell's product launch reflected a broader move by computer makers to move from the nation's saturated cities into relative virgin territory in the huge countryside, analysts said.
"The main market for this computer is in rural areas, where price sensitivity is relatively high," said Cao Ran, an analyst with CCID Consulting in Beijing.
But whether in the cities or in the countryside, the trend is clearly for ever cheaper computers as there are few other ways for companies to compete, she said.
"Overall, the quality of computers in China is pretty much the same so the main strategy for gaining market share is through pricing," she said. Dell, the world's number-two computer maker behind Hewlett-Packard, has manufacturing plants in China, Malaysia and India. Western computer companies are looking to Asia to offset weaker growth at home.
"This year, our purchase from supplier partnerships in Taiwan and China will be 19 billion dollars," Dell told the briefing in Shanghai. "Dell's activities in China directly and indirectly supported 1.5 million jobs here to contribute more than 36 billion dollars to annual GDP." In an indication of the importance of the China market to Dell, the company this week also opened a corporate blog in Chinese.
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