Whether or not you believe the PC market is starting to decline, ASUS chairman Jonney Shih seems to think this is exactly the case, and has stated that ASUS will be shifting its focus from computers to smartphones. This doesn’t mean that ASUS will stop making computers, just that they’ll start focusing more on producing smartphones and mobile devices as opposed to traditional computing systems. According to a recent statement from Shih, “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.”
As the landscape of how people access their computing needs and hop online continues to change, ASUS expects its revenues to shift from 50 percent in PC’s and notebooks to over 50 percent in smartphones by 2017, which currently stands stands at 20 percent of its revenues. ASUS is taking more of a core approach towards delivering devices to consumers which can help them alleviate having “different devices for different purposes,” and instead own one device which is capable of all things. In the smartphone business this is already possible and for many consumers this is already the case as a smartphone serves the purpose of their online needs as well as their music, their camera, their games, and their tasks and much more.
Shih believes that mobile computing is still lagging behind PC computing, and he isn’t wrong, which is easy to understand why they want to focus more on research and development in the smartphone space. People are becoming more accustomed to having a smartphone as their sole computing device and ASUS wants to be one of the companies who can provide solutions to people. With ASUS devoting close to $650 million of its annual revenue to research and development, it will be interesting to see if that number increases or decreases as they put more of that money into research and development on mobile products. ASUS has just recently started to expand more globally with smartphones this year with the launch of the ZenFone 2 and recently launched ZenFone 2E, and while much of ASUS PC computing products are available in the U.S., their smartphones typically have not been. With more of a focus on smartphones and convertibles perhaps the U.S. will see more smartphones from ASUS.