Tech Firms Woo Next Billion Users

Monday, November 6, 2006

Intel hopes to work with local companies and governments to replicate the setup in hundreds of other villages in China, and is helping deliver computers and Internet access to rural health clinics and schools. It is also rolling out similar initiatives in India. Dressed in a red turban and shawl, Mr. Barrett inaugurated a high-speed wireless network in the rural town of Baramati on Thursday. The goal for Intel, which makes the chips that run most of the world’s PCs, is to hook a new part of the population on using technology — and, eventually, to turn them into customers. Big technology companies, their established markets maturing, increasingly see their future in a huge but seemingly unlikely pool of potential customers: poor, rural residents of the world’s developing countries.

That is what brought Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel Corp., to Shijingwei, a farming hamlet in southern China’s Guangdong province, this week. On a warm autumn day, Mr. Barrett sat in a dusty, one-story cement building for a demonstration of the community’s first Internet-connected personal computer — donated by the U.S. semiconductor giant in August. A village official, Huang Yongqing, showed how residents can use the computer to check previously hard-to-find market prices for sugar cane and fruit and adjust their crop mixes accordingly to maximize their profits.

Intel hopes to work with local companies and governments to replicate the setup in hundreds of other villages in China, and is helping deliver computers and Internet access to rural health clinics and schools. It is also rolling out similar initiatives in India. Dressed in a red turban and shawl, Mr. Barrett inaugurated a high-speed wireless network in the rural town of Baramati on Thursday. The goal for Intel, which makes the chips that run most of the world’s PCs, is to hook a new part of the population on using technology — and, eventually, to turn them into customers.

The Intel projects in two of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies — and similar ones in other countries — are part of a broader push by it and other tech giants to do well by doing good in poorer parts of the world that until recently have been largely cut off from technology.

Their aim is to reach what executives call “the next billion users” of consumer technologies like the Internet and cellular phones. The images of executives helping the poor can also help maintain good relations with the government, a critical part of doing business in both China and India.

Intel announced in May plans to spend $1 billion over five years to improve Internet access in developing countries and train teachers how to use technology. Motorola Inc., in cooperation with the GSM Association, an industry group, is making specially designed mobile phones priced under $30 for people in emerging markets who have never used them before. Millions of the phones have already been sold. Microsoft Corp. is experimenting with lower-cost pricing models for its software in developing countries, and helping setting up Internet kiosks in rural areas.

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Source: Wall Street Journal (link opens in a new window)