In a bid to eventually sell more chips, Intel plans to announce Monday that it has set up four new offices around the world that are staffed with anthropologists and engineers to help design computers with features for emerging markets.

 

Traveling from dusty rural villages in India to busy Internet cafés in Brazil, these Intel employees will collect data from weather to the content needs of people in regions where computers are not yet popular.

 

The Santa Clara, California-based chip maker has set up the new development centers in Bangalore, Cairo, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai. The centers are part of a new business unit, the channel products group, that Intel created this year.

 

In a sign of China’s growing importance to Intel, Shanghai will become the headquarters of the channel products group, the only business unit based outside of the United States. China is the world’s second-largest PC market and the third-largest consumer of semiconductors used in all electronics.

 

“Two years ago, we came to the realization that we really need to understand the local markets and find unique solutions for them,” said Willy Agatstein, general manager of Intel’s channel definition and development group.

 

The centers and the new business group aren’t Intel’s first attempt at selling its chips and motherboards to the often-small businesses that build and peddle computers in the less-developed world. The chip giant began working with these computer builders and retailers in 1995.

 

And Intel hasn’t just stationed salespeople around the world. It also dispatched managers from company headquarters to visit local customers and hear their concerns. Through this process, the chip maker discovered that geography and culture shape how consumers use their computers.

 

Intel’s Anthropologists

The company began sending ethnographers to study how people interact with technologies. One anthropologist spent a year living in rural China.

 

With the creation of its new business unit and four development centers, Intel has set up permanent and locally hired staff to do ethnographic studies and engineering. The efforts appear to be paying off.

 

The company already collaborated with Founder Group, a Chinese computer maker, to launch a PC earlier this year that allows users to restrict its Internet use. The designers put in the switch in response to Chinese parents’ concerns that their children would spend too much time playing games and not enough hours on their homework.

 

Intel is working on a project targeting farming communities in India, where heat and unreliable power supply present challenges for keeping and using a PC. The company expects to launch a PC for this market next year, said Mr. Agatstein.

 

Mr. Agatstein declined to say how much money will be spent setting up and operating the four development centers.

 

Intel isn’t the only tech company with resources to hire anthropologists and other experts to help it figure out what consumers want. Software giant Microsoft also has a team of specialists doing similar projects around the world.


Source: Red Herring 1.8.05

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