Worldwide notebook sales grow at fastest rate for 8 years

Upwardly mobile

We all know PC sales have been registering decent year-on-year increases but, frankly, they should be after the carnage of Q1 2009. The latest figures from market researcher Gartner, however, reveal some parts of the market are recovering especially well.

Worldwide mobile PC (notebooks and netbooks) sales grew by 43.4 percent year-on-year, to nearly 50 million units, in Q1 2010. This is the highest growth the mobile PC market has experienced in eight years (after the dotcom bubble burst) and apparently represents $36 billion in end-user spending, which equates to $720 per lappy.

"Mini-notebook PCs were a big part of the bump in mobile PC shipments in the first quarter of 2010, with shipments growing 71 percent over the same period last year," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "However, mini-notebooks' share slowed in some regions as consumers begin to understand the limitations of mini-notebooks, especially in the face of aggressive price cuts of regular notebooks."

"The average selling price (ASP) of mobile PCs was $732 in the first quarter of 2010, a 15.7 percent decline from the first quarter of 2009, when the ASP was $868. The ASP for mobile PCs is expected to stabilize as sales into the professional market will grow, resulting in slightly higher ASPs compared to consumer mobile PCs."

The popularity of netbooks and lower priced notebooks is reflected in the growth of Acer, ASUS and ‘others' at the expense of HP and Dell. It will be interesting to see how these figures look in a year's time, when tablets have had some time to establish themselves.

Table 1
Worldwide Mobile PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)