Netbooks beat recession, double sales in first quarter

The PC’s loss could well be the netbook’s gain with the pint-sized gizmo posting huge numbers Q1 of calendar 2009.

According to technology market research agency Gartner, netbooks recorded a whopping 100% plus jump in quarter-on-quarter sales up to March 2009 at 36,000 units compared with nearly 16,000 units up to December, 2008.

In the whole of 2008 alone, netbooks sold an approximate 30,000 units.

The total notebook market in India is estimated at 2.5 million units per year of which the entry level is estimated at around 10% in size.

Thanks to price points beginning at Rs 19,000, netbooks have caught the fancy of consumers who are looking at them the second or even third PC, said Diptarup Chakraborti, principal research analyst at Gartner, the information technology consultancy.

Four major players, Acer, Asus, HP, HCL and Dell are the dominant players in this market while other players like Samsung, which launched 4 new models on Thursday, are gunning for a share of the lucrative market. Though a late entrant, Korean major Samsung is expecting to take a significant 7-8% share of the market by 2010.

“Mini Note will be a large growth category for us”, said Ranjit S Yadav, director, IT business, Samsung India Electronics Pvt Ltd, said. Globally the company had seen mobile PC sales grow 92.9% in Q1 this year, he added.

Acer was the category leader with sales of 13,000 units followed by HCL which sold 5500 units and HP which sold 4,900 units in the quarter.

Category pioneer Asus sold 3,090 units in the three months.

“What is interesting is that while the netbook was thought to be predominantly a consumer segment phenomena, demand is also coming in from the enterprise and education segments, and going forward we feel it will definitely contribute to the overall growth of the notebook market,” said Chakraborti.

“It is projected that 2-3 lakh netbooks will be sold in 2009,” said Stanley Wu, country head for Notebook & Eee PC business, Asus India, adding that he expected sales of the company’s Eee PC range to increase several fold with more consumers getting aware of it.

While the credit should go to Asus for identifying the form factor and developing it, given its bulk Acer was able to engineer the specs for lower price and power to corner the market, said S Ranjendran, chief marketing officer, Acer India.

The quantum leap in the netbook market, however, came with the Intel Atom chips developed specifically for small form factor devices and launched in India in June last year.