By Chris Connery – Vice President, PC and Large Format Commercial Displays, DisplaySearch and Robin Wu – Analyst, PC and TFT, DisplaySearch
To Western and mature-market PC purchasers, the term “China Innovation” has long been a contradiction. China has been perceived as a region of me-too products and cheap knock-off PCs. Western PC purchasers have often joked about fake brands from China, which attempted to confuse purchasers with real name-brand Japanese, American, European, and even Korean products. China has now become the world’s largest market for desktop PCs, which outpace mobile PC shipments in this market.
However, to consumers, desktop PC sales are still greatly defined as do-it-yourself (DIY). AOC is the top monitor “brand” in China, and PC-bundlers, including China-domestic players Lenovo, Founder, Tongfang, as well as foreign PC brands such as Dell and HP, still lag far behind in consumer sales as PC users continue to prefer building their own PCs. The monitor is still considered to be simply another piece to add on during the process of putting together a desktop system. To many in the West, the DIY space gives an impression of a chaotic consumer-PC space, with perceptions of pirate (Shanzhai) companies still ruling the consumer PC space.
As the definition of the PC evolves in mature markets with the advent of tablet/slate PCs, innovation is also changing the traditional PC space. The last decade experienced the continued evolution of Lenovo, which took over the IBM PC brand (around 2006), and now there has been an alignment of Acer with the second-largest Chinese domestic brand, Founder. These alignments are a sign of things to come. Western companies are moving from perceiving China as just a region of production to viewing the market as a region for consumption as well. If consumption generates competition, and increased competition leads to innovation, then we can expect that China will become more innovative as it looks inward as an end-market in order to set brands apart.
The beginnings of such innovation from Chinese PC brands can be seen by the “upstart” brand, Lenovo. While this brand is hardly a household name in the US, European, and Japanese markets, one of the most innovative products we have seen at CES in the last two years is the IdeaPadU1 convertible tablet/notebook PC. This product was first shown last year (with a proprietary Linux OS) before the battle lines were drawn for tablet PC operating systems (like iOS, Android, and webOS). The IdeaPadU1 never really made it to market, but it was shown again at this year’s CES with a Windows/Android base (Windows for the notebook version and Android for the removable tablet). The product was developed in Beijing, China by a team called Lenovo Corporate Research & Development, and it is manufactured by OEM partners, including Quanta and Wistron.
While the IdeaPadU1 is not a new product, indications as to the region where it will first be shipped and marketed are—you guessed it—China!
