The Hindu : Cheaper notebook PCs

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 26, 2003

Business

Business

Cheaper notebook PCs

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE NOV. 25. It took two years, but finally lay Indian customers — not just well-heeled expense-account executives — are being offered portable personal computers priced below the half a lakh rupees by multiple vendors. This may persuade many first time users, especially those who are pressed for space at home and those who do some of their computing on the move, to consider buying a notebook computer rather than a desktop machine.

Last week Hewlett Packard announced two models of their Compaq Presario notebook range, priced just below Rs. 50,000. Both are powered by the Celeron 2.4 MHz chip, Intel's budget brother of the Pentium processor range.

While the screen size is the standard 14 inch liquid crystal, costs have been kept down by limiting the hard disk to 20 gigabytes and the memory to 128 MB. Both models -2183AT and 2184AT come with a 48x CD drive and a standard modem; but one of them lacks a floppy drive. The major departure is HP's decision to preload the notebooks with Mandrake Linux version 9.1 rather than with the Windows operating system — something that would save around Rs 3000.

"For every thirty desktop PCs sold in India, only one laptop is sold,'' said Ravi Swaminathan, HP's Vice President (Personal Systems) in India, speaking to The Hindu on Sunday, "By lowering the price barrier, we would like to enable more consumers to buy portables, bringing the ratio nearer to the international figure of 5:1.''

Other initiatives here seem to hold out the hope that this may be a broad industry dive into the below-Rs. 50,000 arena. The Taiwan-based Acer already has its budget notebook, the Travelmate 243 FX in the Indian market with almost similar specifications and a Rs. 49,999 price tag. They are also throwing in a Reliance mobile connection and a data cable to access your Net account.

In September, Zenith launched a "Topper'' series of notebooks, with special pricing for students and teachers in the price range of Rs. 55,000 to Rs. 75,000. Normally an aggressive believer in "MNC quality at Indian prices,''

Zenith can be expected to compete in the sub-50,000 range by some dealer-driven discounting. To further heat up the budget notebook scene, Korean-based LG, announced yesterday that it would be launching its own notebook range in India by January 2004. In the global market $1000 was for long the threshold price for notebooks - but budget machines similar to the ones on offer in India this week can already be had for around $700 — and the entry of chain stores like Walmart can be expected to further drive this down to around $500-$550.

Indian customers will however continue to pay higher-than-global prices because of stiff import duties.

`Made for India' server

to drive HP's growth

Even as the latest figures released by industry watcher IDC attested to Hewlett Packard's lead in the Intel-based Indian server market, the company has launched a new model cannily targeting the burgeoning small business market here.

HP's tally of 3866 units of standard Intel architecture servers shipped in the third quarter this year is twice the number it sold in the same period last year. Vaibhav Phadnis, HP India's Country Manager for Industry Standard Servers, speaking to The Hindu attributed this to the sharp growth in the banking and finance sectors.

According to IDC, HP leads with about a third of this end of the total Indian server market.

Interestingly, the largest chunk of the server business here comes from entry level machines - internationally reckoned as those costing less than $ 3000. To ignite business in this arena, HP has created a server specifically to address the wish list of users in India and China:

The just-launched Proliant ML 150 is based on up to two Xeon 2.4 GHz processors and can address 12 GB of memory and 730 GB of mass storage.

Assembled in Bangalore, the machine is priced in its typical configuration at Rs 94, 900.

It is aimed at applications looking at up to 250 clients. For even smaller file and print server needs, HP's TC 2120 costs just under Rs 70,000.

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