Netbook demand surge to slow next year
Acer to become Nokia of netbooks, claims researcher
Acer will extend its lead over Asus this year, as World+Dog buys even more netbooks, causing demand to surge.
So claims market watcher DisplayBank. It calculates that of the of the 14.65m netbooks that shipped globally in 2008, 5.45m were Acer machines while 4.85m were produced by Asus, who's original Eee PC arguably set the whole trend rolling.
DisplayBank's prediction for 2009 puts Acer on 11.3m units and Asus on 6.45m, year-on-year increases of 107.3 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively. That will give Acer 42.9 per cent of the netbook market in 2009 and Asus just under a quarter of the market.
The research reckons HP, MSI and Dell will come next, respectively gaining shares of 6.9 per cent, 4.2 per cent and 3.6 per cent.
In short, Acer will become the Nokia of netbooks this year.
Source: DisplayBank
DisplayBank's forecast for the mobile PC market as a whole anticipates 14.9 per cent unit growth, with 2008's 133.22m shipments rising to 153.12m this year. It forecasts that some 17.2 per cent of those machines will be netbooks - some 26.34m, in other words.
That's a 79.8 per cent year-on-year growth rate, we calculate, way in excess of growth experienced by the mobile PC market as a whole and a sign that demand is shifting toward netbooks.
But it won't lastr - they'll not account for more than 20 per cent of the mobile PC market, DisplayBank reckons, at least not through 2012.
It forecasts netbooks' share of the all portable PCs shipped rising to 18.5 per cent next year - unit-shipment growth of just 24.45 per cent year on year, based on DisplayBank's forecast numbers.
The researcher sees mobile PC shipments continuing to rise through 2012, but after 2010, netbooks' share of the total will plateau at around 18.9 per cent. That's a solid part of the mobile PC market, but shows - in DisplayBank's there's still plenty of demand for bigger, more capable machines. ®
COMMENTS
Netbooks
Display bank says the netbook market will reach to about 26 Million units, and continue to grow by some percentage till the time the research is available. I guess everything is in Netbook favour - the changing consumer perception that enough processing power is available in atom processor for his and he/she doesn't require a bloated specifications machine to get on with his daily chores, the price point which is closer to a mid/high end mobile phone, Ones over dependence on the information on the go. Acer and Asus being the early adopters are surely enjoying the fruits of their wisdom while others have a catching act to do. 9 out of top 10 PC manufacturers (excluding apple) have launched their versions of Netbook which will further explode the market and the market may grow well beyond 26 million units - ---which would only put further strain on the PC companies in terms of revenue and profitability.
Re: Ermmm...
No contradiction at all. Netbooks can both slow in demand *and* outsell everything else.
All this requires is for everything else to have their sales volumes take a quick trip down the shitter, like there was a recession on or something.
Are we near to a replacement for the HP Jornada 720 yet then?
Or the Psion 5? Or even, heaven forbid, the Psion Netbook?
What was old, is now new again.
Incidentally, please remember that Netbook is a trademark of Psion plc: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ohim?ohimnum=E428250
More steps
I think the next few years will bring two parallel trends:
1. Wintel-based netbooks will be bigger and better specced.
2. A new crop of non-Wintel netbooks will dominate the market for really small and cheap netbooks with long battery life, but low specifications.
The latter will almost certainly not run Windows, but some of them might use x86-compatible processors, though I think most will use ARM.
re: HP 2133
You didn't spoil anyones party. As mentioned, the C7 in it's 1.2Ghz form is more than capable of XP or Windows 7. I would skip Vista on it thou...
My Mininote with XP boots and is feels responsive than my dualcore E6600 with Vista. I wouldn't want to do number crunching on my Mininote, but if all you want is XP, Office 2007, and a Webbrowser, it's unbeatable in netbook.
