In Huawei Technologies, the telecom equipment maker from China, has unveiled a new seven-inch capacitive touchscreen tablet device called MediaPad, which the company plans to start selling from the third quarter of the year. Running on the Honeycomb version of Googles Android OS, the MediaPad weighs less than a pound and uses a dual-core 1.2-gigahertz processor from Qualcomm Inc. There are two cameras; the rear camera is of 5 megapixels, while the front camera is of 1.3 megapixels. There is support for 1080p high-definition (HD) video playback and a HDMI port. Connectivity is through 3G and WiFi.
The company has big investments lined up for India. In the next two years Huawei is planning to start operations at its manufacturing facility in Sriperumbudur, near Chennai. This plant will cater to the needs of the fast growing Indian telecommunications market. It is expected that the plant will attract an investment of around $500 million; the overall investment in the facility, and in research development and marketing of India specific products, will be around $2 billion over the next five years. The contract manufacture of optical infrastructure has already started at the facility and during the next one or two years more products will start being manufactured.
Recently, the company had announced the launch of 3 new stylish smartphones- IDEOS X5, IDEOS X2 and IDEOS Chat targeting the youth segment, and aggressively priced at Rs. 14,999, Rs. 8,999 and Rs. 8,199 respectively. Towards the end of this year, the company intends to launch 10-12 new products, including few more tablets and 3G-based phones in India. According to companys officials, the tablets will be aggressively priced at Rs. 25,000. In the field of handsets, Huawei plans to focus on smartphones retailing at the price of above Rs. 3000. This is about 38 per cent of the Indian handset market. Huawei plans to capture about a significant slice of this market.
Since 2004, the company has sold more than 25 million mobile broadband, home convergence and smart phone segments in India and it expects 10 to 15 per cent growth during the current financial year. Through various service providers, Huawei controls more than 50 per cent of the market for downloading data with data cards. Currently it caters to over 3 million data card users from around 5 million that have actually been sold. The telecom equipment manufacturer has sixteen offices in India. Its research and development centre in Bangalore is employing more than 3000 professionals for designing and developing software and for testing handsets.
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