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BIZCHINA> Top Biz News
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Firm evolves its e-reader brand
By Chen Limin (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-02 08:43 It's not big, but Hanwang Technology, China's leading handwriting recognition company, is dreaming big. The company in September unveiled a 3G e-reader capable of connecting with China Mobile's TD-SCDMA network. "Our vision is to be one of the top 500 companies in the world," said Liu Yingjian, founder and chairman of Hanwang. "Our evolving e-readers are key steps that take us nearer to the goal," Liu said. Specially designed for China Mobile's 3G network, the e-reader can be used to download books, magazines and journals from the Internet. It also allows users to write with a stylus on the screen in Chinese characters, making it the first 3G e-reader supporting handwriting input from all over the world. Meanwhile, China's fledgling e-reader market is now seeing intensifying competition. More competition
For example, Taiwan's leading technology company, Foxconn Electronics, has partnered with China Mobile to develop its Kindle-like e-readers, which could be introduced to the public as early as the first half of next year. "With more companies going to the e-reader market, customers surely will have many more choices," said Zhang Yanan, an analyst with Analysys International. Even in the face of intense competition, Liu is confident. "We have the most advanced technologies such as handwriting recognition, OCR and electromagnetic transmission, and I haven't found a company as competitive as Hanwang in making e-readers," Liu said. "Unlike most of our competitors, we have been extremely focused on what we do for more than 20 years," he said. Before September 2008, when the first e-reader from Hanwang made its debut, the company controlled as much as 70 percent of sales in the handwriting recognition market. In additional to making its own products, Hanwang also granted access to its handwriting recognition algorithms to high technology companies at home and abroad, including Microsoft, Nokia and NEC. This was an important step in Hanwang's development, Liu said, allowing the company to enter the e-reader market by combining its core technologies in a single product. "We have accumulated much experience in man-machine interaction," Liu said. Since 2008, Hanwang has developed 18 different e-readers, including the latest 3G one, targeting a variety of customers ranging from students to businessmen.
According to the trade and technology newspaper DigiTimes, Hanwang ranked third in the global e-reader market in 2008, following Amazon and Sony. Liu said the company is on track to sell 500,000 by the end of this year, which is 300,000 more than the number sold in 2008. In the future, Hanwang will focus on grabbing more market share and making e-readers with more diverse functions, Liu said. A better e-reader "A perfect e-reader will have communication modules and more business applications in it, so that it functions like a mobile phone or laptop to some degree, but still with unique advantages such as a long stand-by time and low electricity consumption," Liu said. Selling his e-readers abroad remains a major challenge, he said. "The international market doesn't have much trust in Chinese brands and we ourselves haven't got a thorough understanding of the global market, either," Liu said. Most of Hanwang's e-reader sales come from the domestic market, with overseas business accounting for only one-fourth to one-third of sales. Zhang of Analysys International said the success of any e-reader depends on how well it connects the terminal to ample content. "Kindle is a big success because it provides users with rich content - more than 270,000 e-books. It's much more than a terminal. That's what any e-reader maker should learn from," Zhang said. (For more biz stories, please visit Industries)
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