Via to help small Chinese netbook makers

An old but interesting article from Financial Times especially because I just picked up five China made generic mobile phones that all turned out to use the Mediatek chipset.

While branded netbooks such as Asus Eee PC sell for Rmb3,500 ($512) or more in China, generic "white box" netbooks are also available from Rmb2,000. These generic netbooks, often similar in appearance to those offered by Asus, HP, Dell, and Acer have appeared in second-tier electronics markets in some mainland Chinese cities.

Now VIA has extended a helping hand by making available a product platform for making cheap netbooks. It hopes to get the price below Rmb2,000 this year and down to Rmb1,500 next year and predicts the whitebox segment would capture up to 20% of the projectd 35 million units global netbook market.

VIA is hoping to replicate what Mediatek was able to do in China's mobile phone market. Mediatek, a Taiwanese chip design house, released turnkey solutions that enabled a lot of small electronics traders mostly in Shenzhen to make mobile phones at very low costs. The handsets, either imitations of branded products or just plain cheap handsets, have proven phenomenally successful that the government was forced to legaliz them.

Interestingly, most of VIA's customer for its netbook platform are manufacturers of such handsets and consumer electronics gadgets, such as MP3 players and DVD players.