HCL Infosystems Ltd, a leading IT company, on Monday announced the launch of 'HCL PC for India' at a price of Rs 9,990.
Backed by HCL's 'best assured' brand assurance, the new PC, which will run on a Linux operating system, will support all standard applications like word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, web browing, emails and audio video playback. It will also come with multilingual fonts like Tamil.
The new PC's configuration include 1 GHZ processor, 128 MB RAM, 40 GB hard disk, 15 inch digital colour monitor, 52X optical drive, keyboard and scroll mouse. The company has tied up with Via, a Taiwanese-based company, for microprocessors.
After launching the new PC in Chennai, Union Minister for Communication and Information Technology Dayanidhi Maran said that the ideal way to reach the PC penetration target was through low-cost PCs.
He said that the new PC was ideal for first time home users and would have a major impact on the government's plans to set up common service centres in 100,000 villages by 2007.
The chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems, Ajai Chowdhury, said that the new PC had undergone vigorous tests to make it perfect for the Indian conditions. "Most of the existing low-cost PCs are either stripped down versions or made of spurious components," he added.
To overcome the erratic and unreliable power situations, the company has developed a UPS type gadget, which will allow the PC to run on a car battery for up to eight hours.
Asked about how the low-cost PC was conceived, Chowdhry said that the company's home PC market share grew to 15 per cent in March 2005 from 3.7 per cent in January 2004.
"Besides this growth, the government's back-up efforts prompted us to develop a low-cost PC," he added.
He was part of the high-powered working committee formed by the ministry of communications and IT to submit its recommendations on 'improving PC penetration, Internet and domestic software.'
"The projections made in the report also helped us look into developing a low-cost PC," he said adding, "in India, there are only 11 PCs per 1000 people, compared to 50 in China. The report recommends increasing the number in India to 65 PCs per 1000 people by 2008."
Asked about specific programmes planned to reach rural areas and small towns, he said that the company had increased its number of channel partners to 3000 from 800 in the beginning of this year.
The company has also selected 300 cities to set up service centres, where genuine parts will be available. "As part of our initial strategy, we will first create the network," he said adding, "we are training people to do the first level of services in these locations.
Maran said that the new PC was ideal for starters. The affordability would encourage more people to buy the system. "I am sure more manufacturers will also come out with such low cost systems and the prices will further go down," he added.
He also said that a plan to set up an open source centre at Chennai was on the anvil.
