Hanvon to enter US e-reader market in 2011

Hanvon Technology (002362.SZ), China’s leading manufacturer of electronic reading devices, plans to enter the US market by June or July, posing a direct challenge to Amazon’s (AMZN.NASDAQ) Kindle product line, Bloomberg reported. Hanvon will target educational and professional users with a 9.7-inch screen device, pitting it against the Kindle DX, the largest of Amazon’s e-readers. "The key in the US market is a high-tech product at a low cost," said Jessica Zhang, a general manager at Hanvon. "Amazon isn’t a technical company, but we are, so we’re going to try to make a better product." Hanvon claims to control 70% of the Chinese e-reader market through its WISEreader product line, although it lost 10 percentage points of market share following the introduction of Kindle’s international version last year. Zhang said Hanvon has yet to secure agreements with publishers to distribute e-books on its devices. This limits the company to offering out-of-copyright books.