Intel's Amazon Ambitions

By: Richard ShafferMon Jan 28, 2008 at 6:05 PM

How a Brazilian town best known for its Festival of the Ox became a marketing tool for the world's biggest semiconductor company.

Making Friends, Creating Customers
Intel's World Ahead Program is an ambitious billion-dollar venture, but other tech and telecom companies are also building relationships in developing countries that promise to become the most massive of mass markets.
Infographic: A New World
Intel now gets more than half of its revenues from less-developed countries in Asia and the Americas.

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Intel is not the only U.S.-based multinational promoting itself in Parintins. Coca-Cola has spent $25 million to sponsor Boi Bumbá for 13 years--and to publicize Kuat, its high-caffeine soda. But Intel is in Parintins to demonstrate the usefulness of products that few of the local residents can buy today. In the first half of last year, 14 teachers and 60 tutors learned how to use computers in planning lessons, gathering course materials, and classroom teaching; 208 students acquired basic computer skills and learned how to browse the Internet. Local physicians at a community clinic consult with specialists three times a week. "It's nothing earth shattering," says Mateja de Leonni Stanonik, vice president of the International e-Hospital Foundation, who visited the clinic last summer. "But to have something like this in the Amazon is quite important." So far, says Carlos Luzzi, manager of corporate affairs for Intel Brazil, "the health-care center is doing 8 on a scale of 10," while the schools are at five or six.

Hardly the hyperbolic digital makeover of Intel's initial press release. "These kids now have a little more opportunity than they did before," Barrett says, "and we're seeding the forest for the next billion trees." Not to mention the next billion customers.

Richard Shaffer writes about technology and economics from New York.