Netbook Market: Huge
It’s been an interesting year since the Eee PC has taken off and Asus has seen fit to introduce one new Eee PC netbook for every month of the year with extras to spare. And of course, every other manufacturer has decided to make one (even a Commodore netbook!) which has resulted in an absolute explosion of products being available to the consumer and thus requiring production to be ramped up. Just how big has this market gotten? Well, Acer is expecting to ship another 2 million netbooks in the third quarter of this year, and that’s just Acer.
Acer, in fact, has already estimated shipping 5-7 million Acer Aspire One netbooks this year and is on the road to completing that goal and that’s not including the rest of the market. Acer’s chairman has predicted the netbook market to hit 10 million units this year (that’s as many iPhones as Apple wants to sell before the year is out) and I can only imagine that means a crapload more for next year.
Interestingly enough, Compal’s chairman doesn’t think the market has or will see that many. While Compal may not be an entirely familiar name to some, they’re responsible for building many of the laptops out there that are then badged by first and second (and third?) tier manufacturers. Compal’s chairman has predicted a modest 7-8 million netbooks hitting the market this year, but, and get this, predicts the netbook market to break 30 million units next year. Read that again: 30 million. And half of those will be Asus Eee models.
I kid. Just the same, that’s a crapload for something that’s never had a big market share if you include UMPCs and tablet computers and other such things in the netbook moniker. That’s just amazing.
No word on how many Acer Aspire One netbooks Acer plans on selling next year (maybe it’ll be the Acer Aspire Two when the dual-core Atoms are more prevalent — you heard it here first), but if they’re planning on hitting 7 million this year, another 7 seems like a given next year.
At what point can we say that the netbook market has been fully saturated? Almost everyone will have a netbook by next year and many of those that have one now aren’t bringing anything worthwhile to the tablet. Samsung, for instance, said “us too” just recently (the news hit this morning and I ignored it, in case you hadn’t noticed) and so many others have too that it just makes me wonder how much more the market can handle. More innovation and less “us too” would be a good thing. Make your netbook stand out and worthwhile. At the very least, follow the Commdore netbook and give it some old school style. Yeah, I want a laptop that has a Commodore logo on it even if it doesn’t mean the same thing any more.
For more info and numbers on netbook production, hit up DigiTimes.
