There’ve been a lot of reports indicating that the demand for netbooks might be cooling off. But you knwo what? DisplaySearch reports that 22.2% of all notebooks shipped during the second quarter of 2009 were netbooks. Mini-laptops also saw a quarter to quarter 40% increase in shipments , compared with 22% growth in the traditional laptop space.
Part of the growth has been spurred by telecoms in Europe and other areas that offer cheap or free netbooks to customers who sign up for long terms service contracts. Netbooks represent a larger share of the pie in Europe and North America than in developing nations. But in some areas including Latin America and Greater China, netbook penetration is actually higher than notebook penetration.
It’s not entirely clear from the press release whether DisplaySearch is counting newer 11.6 inch and 12.1 inch laptops as “netbooks,” but I don’t think it matters too much since these larger computers were still pretty rare during most of Q2 2009.
via TechCrunch
Any idea what a “Portable PC” is as opposed to a “Notebook PC”? Are these luggables over some kind of size/weight threshold?
When you say that “But in some areas including Latin America nad Greater China, netbook penetration is actually higher than notebook penetration,” you seem to have misread the chart on that page
Actually, I’m reading directly from the press release, which says
“Mini-note penetration in Latin America and Greater China is higher
than notebook PC penetration, as shown in Table 2.”
At first I was a bit confused by the chart as well, but when you take
that line into consideration and look at it again, it makes sense.
Table 2 is showing market penetration… not market share. In other
words, the numbers don’t add up to 100% because not everybody has a
portable computer.