Hewlett-Packard (HP) Corp will begin delivering the HP TouchPad and beta versions of WebOS on Windows-based PCs later this year.[Photo / China Daily]

BEIJING - Hewlett-Packard (HP) Corp, the world's largest PC maker by shipment volume, is aiming to sell 100 million devices that use its WebOS operating system this year. China will be an important growth region to which it "will be adding a lot of focus", Leo Apotheker, HP's chief executive officer, said on Tuesday.

Apotheker, speaking to Chinese media for the first time since becoming CEO last year, said HP will place greater emphasis on cloud computing (using the Web as a hard drive), connectivity and software this year to increase its earnings to $7 a share by 2014, a rise of 53 percent from $4.58 in 2010.

"As to competition and what's happening in the Asia-Pacific and Japan area, the Chinese and Indian markets are of course very important regions for us," he said. The Chinese market now accounts for about 10 percent of the company's global sales revenue.

By extending its WebOS operating system from mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet PCs, into PCs and printers through cloud-computing, HP said it plans to sell 100 million units and provide leading development tools to build a community of software developers, which will be the industry's first open-cloud marketplace.

"We are very much focused on the Asia-Pacific region when we talk about mobile. This is the region where mobile is taking off the fastest," Apotheker said.

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After purchasing the cell phone software and hardware maker Palm Inc for $1.2 billion last year, HP decided to launch two smartphones and a tablet PC, which are all based on Palm's operating system WebOS. HP has announced that the HP TouchPad will be available this summer in the United States and select markets worldwide, including China, by the end of the year.

According to the research company IDC, up to 5 million tablet PCs could be shipped to China this year, compared with 1.39 million units in 2010.

Apotheker told China Daily that HP will begin delivering beta versions of WebOS on Windows-based PCs later this year. "Delivering WebOS is an important part of our strategy as it provides a large number of devices for application developers," he said.

Regarding competition in the Chinese market, Apotheker said he believes that the development of tablet PCs is just the beginning, not the end, of the mobility race. He emphasized the availability of localized applications, services and content for the HP TouchPad as critical to its success in China, and that the company is focusing on markets that already have a WebOS presence.

"The world has changed dramatically, and we increasingly live in a world where enterprise and personal IT experiences are blurring," said Crawford Del Prete, chief research officer at IDC. "HP's strategy lays a foundation for the company to move from delivering information technology to information experiences."

In an earlier exclusive interview with China Daily last month, the company said it expects to reclaim its number two position in the Chinese market and is aiming for growth of 25 percent year-on-year.