Asus wants to be a smartphone company, not a laptop company

Taiwanese electronics major AsusTek's chairman Jonney Shih on his maiden visit to India on Thursday said the group was shifting its focus from notebooks to smartphones and convertibles.

'The PC market is slowly showing signs of decay as the world is moving to a cloud first, mobile first platform. At Asus, we believe in riding the current technology wave and hence in our research and development we are focusing more on devices like convertibles that will provide more productivity and connectivity on the go,' Jonney Shih told IANS on the sidelines of the Zen Festival where Asus launched three new phones and showcased some tablets.

'The trend is to get to a convergent device that will replace all other devices and make it easier for the easier. Having said that, mobile computing is still behind compared to PC-like experience,' Shih said.

Further explaining, he said: 'As the world is adapting to the IoT platform, Asus is driving research to put devices on consumers' hands that will allow free them from the curse of owing different devices for different purposes.'

Asus drives nearly 4.5% of its revenue into research and development which nearly amounts to $650 million.

AsusTek, which 13,600 employees and 4,500 engineers, closed the financial year 2014-15 with a revenue of $14.5 billion.

'Our growth has been steady and the group has been growing at a pace of 20% year-on-year. We intend to carry forward the momentum this year as well,' Shih said.

Currently, the electronics major which manufactures motherboards, PCs, laptops and smartphones among many other products, draws more than 50% of its revenue through PCs and notebooks.

'Nearly 20% of our revenue comes from smartphones, and by 2017 we are expecting that more than 50% of our revenues will come from this vertical,' he said.

Asked about the reason behind using more Intel chips on their smartphones, Shih said: 'Intel chips are really powerful, powerful than most of the processors we see in the market and hence we have stuck to it. There are also less problems of heating.'

'Other smartphone brands don't use Intel as they are quite happy with a Qualcomm or a MediaTek. They don't want to experiment. Also, Intel somewhat neglected the mobile generation of processors and hence started late. It is trying to catch up now.'

Asus, which is currently the fourth largest PC vendor in the world, also has tied up with Microsoft to bring new devices with Windows 10.

Asked about the association, Shih said: 'Android is not doing much about productivity on tablets or phablets but Microsoft comes with a promise. I believe that work and play cannot be separated and hence the user should have the choice of just one device which does it all for the person.'