Other vendors
Apart from feverish competition in the notebook space, one reason for this is the change in the use of desktops. “Consumer desktop prices haven’t dropped so much because they’re changing into more of a specialist device for things like home entertainment and gaming as people can afford multiple machines,” said Morvay. “There was also a big shift to quad-core.”
But there does appear to be less competition in the UK desktop market too. The top three increased their desktop market share by 3.9 percent in Q2 but actually saw their notebook market share drop by 0.6 percent. Again, a lot of this is due to Asus, which had a notebook market share of 4.6 percent in Q1 but grabbed 6.3 percent of it in Q2.
"Consumer desktops are changing into more of a specialist device for things like home entertainment and gaming"Other notebook vendors that did well in Q2 were Sony, whose 5.3 percent of the market came on the back of 120 percent year on year volume growth. According to Morvay a lot of this was down to a deal with DSGi and the production of special cheap (~£500) models unique to the UK market. Apparently we’re the most price conscious country in Europe.
Samsung also benefitted from a DSGi deal and saw its market share increase from 1.5 percent in Q1 to 2.4 percent in Q2. Fujitsu Siemens saw a decline in Q2, but it was apparently renewing its entire product portfolio and so wasn’t selling through last quarter. It will hope to show an improvement in Q3, when the new stuff comes out.
