Netbook increases market-share during Q1-09

The netbook proportion becomes 20% in the first quarter of this year.

Primary data from DisplaySearch shows that last quarter saw almost six million netbooks being shipped by the manufacturers which accounted for nearly 20% of the total notebook sales. Acer leads the pack with 30.5% of the netbook sales, with Asustek a distant second with nearly half of what Acer has sold. This is to be noted that the notebook category is lead still by HP with 24.1% of share.

According to an article in Digitimes, it’s been observed that penetration rates for mini-notebooks were the highest in EMEA and Latin America, and the lowest in China, Japan and North America. “Approximately 45% of all mini-notes shipped in the quarter went into EMEA, compared to less than 26% in North America. By contrast, EMEA accounted for 38% of the total notebook market, while North America was less than 30%.”

The notebook industry as a whole saw a new 2^nd place in Acer, above no. 3 and former no. 2 Dell, capturing 18.8% of the market. However, of the top- five notebook PC brands, Acer had the greatest percentage of their total shipments accounted for 31.6%, compared to HP, Dell, Toshiba and Lenovo, all of whom shipped less than 10% of their volume as mini-notes – as reported by Digitimes .

"It is clear at the moment that mini-notes play a vital role in the total PC market. Without the additional volume provided by these products, shipment volumes for the notebook PC market would have been down 19% on year, instead of only falling 3%. While there is no doubt that many buyers of mini-notes would have chosen larger notebook PCs if mini-notes were not available, it is also certain that many buyers might have chosen not to purchase a notebook PC at all," said John F Jacobs, director of notebook market research at DisplaySearch.