[photopress:IT_China_rural.jpg,full,alignright]Shi Jichun, vice governor of Henan Province, has said Haier will set up a joint venture company with Henan Zhongcheng Computer Company to produce computers for rural consumers.
The Haier Farmer PC Jiajiale (“Happy Family” in English) computer has been jointly developed by Intel, Haier and the Ministry of Information Industry, and is designed to help Chinese villagers who lack computer skills to get access to Internet easily by its special functions like one-click Internet browsing and text-to-voice service.
The new company will reportedly be able to produce more than 300,000 computers each year. This extends to one million ‘practical’ computers — where ‘practical’ is not defined but means stripped down and inexpensive — for rural residents in three and a half years.
Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, promised during his recent visit to China to donate 6,000 computers to farmers in China.
He said the company would provide 2,000 Haier brand computers to farmers in five Chinese provinces in 2007. Of those, 300 computers would be given to farmers in Henan province and the remaining 1,700 to rural residents in Guangdong, Sichuan, Shandong and Heilongjaing.
The first batch of Haier’ new rural computers is expected to come out around October 1. All of which fits in very well with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s drive to provide computers and computer training in rural China. Our illustration shows one of its workshops in progress.
Sources: TMCNet, China Tech News and Jongo News