Simputer's commercial rollout pushed to July By Imran Qureshi, Indo-Asian News Service
Bangalore, May 22 (IANS) The commercial rollout of India's most promising IT product, the common man's low-cost PC called simputer, is now expected in the second week of July. The simputer was originally planned to hit the markets in August last year. Its release was rescheduled for November and then May this year. The postponement of the commercial rollout after successful field trials has not dampened the interest of prospective buyers, with requests coming in from North America, Africa, South America and the Far East. "It is taking long because it is a typical chicken and egg situation. But we have received orders for a couple of thousand units already and we have tied up for its manufacture abroad as well because the volume from abroad will explode soon," Vinay Deshpande, CEO of Encore Software, told IANS. "We had to entirely depend on internal resources to fund the pilots for field trials. That roughly comes to Rs.15 million. But the good news is that we have begun commercial production of the new version that is more stylish." Deshpande, three of his colleagues from privately held Encore and four scientists from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) joined hands to produce the simputer in 1998. The scientists have set up a separate company, PicoPeta Simputers, whose products are being tested in Chhattisgarh for an education project in association with World Space Radio. PicoPeta's simputers are manufactured at the state-owned Bharat Electronics while Encore's products are produced at its sister company, Peninsula. "Producing 500 units for, say, 10 or 15 parties would cost Rs.10,000 a unit. And we had already invested quite a lot in developing the product," says Deshpande. But the delay has been, to a large extent, fruitful. Encore's improved version is now aimed at all sections of society. Apart from the common man's version, it has other versions priced at Rs.15,000 and a high-end version that costs Rs.24,000. The low-end product has a black and white LCD screen and 16 MB RAM with MB flash while the high-end one has a colour screen with 64MB RAM and 32 MB Flash. The high-end version can be attached to a GSM, GPRS cell network, wired LAN, a micro printer or even a bar code reader. "The Rs.15,000 product is inclusive of all taxes. Taxes alone account for Rs.4,500. But the original target of reaching the common man is still achievable. If the government exempts taxes for the simputer, then the cost would fall to Rs.6,500 from Rs.9,000 for the low-end product," says Deshpande. Encore has received orders and enquiries from countries like Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, Canada, Mexico and Argentina. "We would have two high volume manufacturing units to meet the demand from abroad and within India. Both would be capable of scaling up operations," says Deshpande. --Indo-Asian News Service ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
