Overall Notebook revenue decline, because of increase in Netbook revenue

The miniature machines are hurting the overall market

 The sales of portable notebooks are predicted to drop for the first time year-over-year. And guess who the culprit – their miniature is. While netbooks continue to drive volume, the lower average selling point of the hardware may be a contributing factor to the decline in PC revenues.

DisplaySearch is forecasting that netbooks will amount to 21.5 percent of all portable PC shipments, but due to their lower cost, mini-notebooks are predicted to only account for 10.9 percent of the market's revenue.

"Mini-notes [netbooks] have been a significant contributor to volume growth in the portable PC market as their very attractive price points make owning a secondary computer viable for many consumers," crn.com quoted John Jacobs, director of laptop research at DisplaySearch.

The main reason for this is that netbooks are selling more than the hefty laptops, increasing the volume, but reducing the overall revenue as there is not much margin on the netbook, atleast not as much as the bigger notebooks.

"For 2009, we expect continued [average selling price] erosion across all portable computer categories, leading to the first [year-over-year] decline of portable computer revenue," he told crn.