Notebook and vendors
Among the vendors, Acer looks like the big winner these days. "Acer is doing very well in the UK and EMEA, where it's now number one," said Morvay. "Fujitsu Siemens, however, has been disappearing from the UK and is even losing ground in Germany, where it's now third behind Acer and HP."
On to notebooks and the big story is clearly that, in spite the economic slowdown, UK consumer notebook sales grew by 58 percent to 1.3 million. "Notebooks continue to get closer to desktops in terms of price and performance," said Morvay.
We asked Morvay what the primary drivers of this growth have been. "One of the key contributors is the mini-notebook (netbook) sector, which now accounts for around 15 percent of consumer notebook sales. Last quarter it was five percent," she said.
"The majority of mini-notebook sales are going through PC retail but an increasing number are going through telco deals. People expected cannibalisation of the notebook market by mini-notebooks but in fact they have created a separate market of their own."
"We've also seen the arrival of 16 and 18 inch notebook segments. Toshiba has shown a lot of belief in this and we should see other vendors following suit."
Predictably all this growth came at a cost. "Average selling prices (ASP) are still going down quite a lot," said Morvay. "The majority of the notebook market is in the €6-800 range and we expect a decline in ASPs of 18-20 percent."
In summary people are still buying loads of notebooks in the UK. The driver for this are the netbook phenomenon, an increasing trend for them to be sold or given away as part of a mobile phone contract and the fact that they don't cost much more than desktops these days.
