Dubai: With a strong focus on versatility, power and portability, the Taiwanese PC manufacturer, Asus, is keen to strengthen its smartphone and tablet business.
“Even though the PC segment is slowing down, we have done well in the gaming side in key markets globally. The smartphone segment is the challenging one at the moment with the influx of competition and the market shifting to lower price point,” said Erik Sigvald Hermanson, global head of marketing — content and brand, and head of EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) marketing for Asus Computer.
Asus is the world’s fourth-largest PC manufacturer with 7.2 per cent global market share after Lenovo, HP and Dell.
Overall, he said the company is very healthy this year but the smartphone and tablet segments will be the most challenging for the next two years.
“On the phone side, we are shifting from the low-price barrier and move into a unique space to differentiate from the competition with the Zenfone 3 smartphone,” he said.
For the Zenfone 3, Asus has worked with American video games company Electronic Arts (EA) and Qualcomm for certain games testing and preloaded two games — Need for Speed: No Limits and SimCity BuildIt.
“We will be doing lot of interesting things with the EA over the next few months in terms of market collaboration and also pushing unique experiences for our customers. This is an interesting area with lot of potential,” he said.
Gaming is one area which is rapidly growing in the mobile space, he said, and added that with augmented reality and virtual reality, “you are going to see more expansion. So, if we can get in early and start building, then there are big opportunities.”
Regarding virtual reality, he said that Asus will be launching new products in the next two quarters and is working with Google for Daydream platform.
Daydream-ready device is the term Google is giving to its next-generation of devices to satisfactorily deliver virtual reality content on mobile devices.
Even though HTC, Samsung, LG and Huawei have announced support for Daydream, they haven’t yet revealed compatible phones but ZTE’s Axon 7 and Zenfone 3 are the only phones officially certified for Daydream so far.
He said that notebook and gaming are the big revenue drivers for the company. In the region, the market share for Asus in gaming category is around 41 per cent.
Despite the regular laptop taking a big hit in the PC space, he said that there is still a market for regular notebooks from professional users and the company’s strategy is to address all the users.
At Gitex, the company launched its 17.3-inch gaming laptop — ROG G752 — with latest-generation Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics card for Dh11,999. It is a VR-ready machine.
He said that the most powerful gaming laptop — the 18-inch GX800 — will be in the UAE by end of the year.
The company is also expected to launch its ZenBook 3, similar to Apple’s MacBook, and Transformer 3 Pro, similar to Microsoft Surface 4, by end of the year.
