Netbooks and the telco channel
Netbooks constituted a third of all consumer portable shipments in Western Europe in Q2 and their sales are expected to double over the course of this year.
Of growing importance to the whole consumer mobile sector is the telco channel, which offers subsidized hardware in exchange for long term telco contracts.
Portugal continues to do well thanks to a state subsidy scheme, but Sweden and Denmark don't look like bad places to sell a notebook either.
The commercial market is still pretty rubbish across the whole of Western Europe but, once more, Portugal and Scandinavia look the best of the bunch.
In its forecast, IDC seems to be calling the bottom of the EMEA PC market, but we won't see a return to growth until next year and even then it will be modest. The growing reliance on discounting and the telco channel continues to drive down average selling prices.
The main driver for this growth will be, you guessed it, the consumer mobile sector. IDC expects netbooks to be joined by the ‘thin-and-light' segment as growth drivers. Among desktops it expects to see some growth from nettops and all-in-ones, but expects them to remain niche segments thanks to their limited performance.
