Jane Chen / Shanghai Daily news

China's leading developer and manufacturer of handwriting tablet products, Hanwang Technology Co Ltd, aims to raise 300 million yuan (US$38 million) through a share float planned in the first six months of this year on the yuan-dominant A-share market, today's National Business Daily reported.

In preparation, the firm reportedly borrowed 200 million yuan in bank loans earlier this year to speed up the development of personal computer products incorporated with its cutting edge handwriting input and recognition technologies.

Founded in 1993, Hanwang is one of the few companies in the world that have independent intellectual property rights over handwriting input and recognition technologies, according to a Hanwang official quoted in the NBD report.

"Hanwang envisions a handwriting computer for an industrial chain and is focusing on two ends of the chain, namely development and application," he pointed out, in full confidence of the company's self-developed Chinese input technologies.

Analysts remain cautious, however.

Analysys International, an Internet-based consulting institution, forecasted that the market potential for handwriting enabling computers to be limited, because the input and recognition technologies are not sophisticated enough to meet the daily demand of users.

Handwriting input technology, first put forward by Microsoft Corp, has raised industry-wide interest, with competitors now in the field including MS, Intel, AMD, Apple, ASUS, Samsung, and Chinese Founder and Hanwang.