NEC Corp last week announced its cheapest personal computer yet, the the NEC 98FELLOW, an 80486SX machine, which is priced at $1,663. The launch is aimed at Fujitsu Ltd, which recently announced personal computers in its FMR series which for the first time (in Japan at least) are IBM-compatible, and are priced at the same level. NEC said that its price was 40,000 yen below comparable models, and broke the 200,000 yen barrier for the first time. At the same time NEC announced a new series of five machines to be knwon as 98MATE, pre-installed Windows machines ranging in price from $2,552 to $4,266, up to 50% lower in price than previous models. NEC hopes to sell 500,000 of the MATE models and 200,000 of the FELLOW models in the next year. Japanese manufacturers have begun to increase their procurement of motherboards and other components from Taiwan and other countries in South East Asia, thus making possible cheaper machines – a move which has been forced on them by the advent of cheaper Compaq Computer Corp and Dell Computer Corp machines running DOS/V. NEC’s foreign content is now said to be around 30%, and this is set to rise to between 70% and 80%.
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