The results of a DisplaySearch study “Quarterly Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report” has just revealed that the popularity of Netbooks is having a dire effect on Notebook sales and is costing the industry a lot of money.
Chances are if you want to buy a Netbook now, you may find that vendors will try to steer you away from a Netbook and sell you a higher priced Notebook instead, quite likely one of the new systems based on CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) processors.
Now this isn’t because they actually believe it is what you want or need or what is best for you, it is quite simply because these are more profitable for them.
Cheap and cheerful Netbooks are the bane of the computer industry as people are buying them when they might otherwise have bought a standard laptop, which of course costs more.
Let’s face it this hurts, as you will see when we take a look at the figures.
According to the DisplaySearch report, Netbook sales actually account for around 22.2 percent of all laptops shipped but alas, they only bring in 11.7 percent of the revenue.
If we look at what that revenue amounts to in cash, Netbook sales were up from $845 million last year to $3.07 billion this year. Now that’s a lot of Netbooks.
Revenue from Laptop sales on the other hand has dropped dramatically by a whopping $3.74 billion during the same period, which equates to around 14 percent.
Ok so laptop sales have fallen at the expense of a few Netbooks, ok so more than a few, but we should maybe bear in mind that Notebooks still command a massive 89 percent slice of the market, so why the complaints?
The drop in Laptop sales is partly being blamed on the drop in the cost of a Netbook, which on average has fallen by about 29 percent compared to a fully fledged Notebook which has only seen around a 10 percent drop in price.
So, you would think that something that sells as well as Netbooks do would be more than welcome in the industry, but no.
Even with the sheer number of Netbooks sold, there’s no way that the revenue from Netbooks can offset the drop in revenue from Laptop sales.
This means that in reality, Netbooks have actually cost the industry a lot of money, which of course is why the computer industry would really love these pesky little things to just go away.
The only problem is, they just won’t.
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[...] the original post here: Notebooks are losing out to Netbooks and it hurts By admin | category: computer notebooks, netbook | tags: consumer-society, [...]
Netbooks are the only suitable product for some people. These people just buy them solely based on their low prices.
Without netbooks at such a low price point, those people would have just stood with their current desktops or chunky laptops and make zero contribution to the current laptop sales.
The sales figures could be analyzed from another perspective: Laptops sales was inevitable whether netbooks had been here or not, it was netbooks that actually helped manufacturers get an extra 3 billion!