Lenovo, one of the world’s largest makers of personal computers that is mostly known for its ThinkPad-branded business user-oriented premium-class laptops, is considering to enter the market of low-cost netbooks later this year, a representative for the company in Taiwan said on Wednesday.

Ken Wong, general manager of Lenovo Taiwan, said in an interview with DigiTimes web-site that the company was considering launching a netbook product designed with consideration for both consumer and enterprise markets. However, he did not reveal any details.

According to unofficial information, Lenovo will release its netbook by the end of September. It is quite a surprise that the company mostly known for high-end ThinkPad laptops for business users and IdeaPad notebooks for consumers has decided to enter the market of relatively low-cost machines, such as Asus Eee PC, MSI Wind and so on.

It is unknown which contract manufacturer is set to make Lenovo’s netbook. At this point, the likely candidates are Compal Electronics, Wistron and Pegatron Technology. Compal shipped around 1.1 million mainstream notebooks to Lenovo in Q2 2008, while Wistron supplied around 550 – 580 thousand Lenovo ThinkPad X-series ultra-portable notebooks and Pegatron made about 200 thousand IdeaPad laptops.

Actual specifications of Lenovo’s netbooks are not clear at the moment. Given that Lenovo wants to position its netbook or netbooks for both consumers and enterprise markets, the mobile systems should feature relatively high performance components so that to satisfy more or less demanding productivity applications. Moreover, Lenovo’s netbooks are unlikely to be truly affordable since they should feature Microsoft software to address business customers.

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